There really is a 'banality of evil'

I used to think the worst thing that could happen to me personally was losing my job.

Then I lost mine. I was fired from what had been a 28-plus year career as a journalist at least in part because I wouldn't lie to readers who were calling in to complain about changes in the paper that were making the product they received worse.

I was supposed to string them along, to make them believe there was a chance the paper would go back to the way it had been, but I refused to tell them that. I told them changes were being made for financial reasons and that it didn't matter how many people complained or cancelled their subscriptions.

That was almost 10 months ago, and if there's one thing I've learned in that time, it's that there isn't a real big market for over-50 journalists who can't be hired at entry-level salaries.

Of course, that didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was the other lesson I learned -- that while I might miss the salary, I was actually much better off not working at a place where the people in charge have no sense of honor.

I'm sure the man who fired me doesn't think of himself as a bad man. He and I never got along, and in the end he didn't want me working for him. But the idea of lying to readers, the idea of pretending that he cared what they thought when he knew his mission was to cut costs and downsize the newspaper, was a terrible thing.

Some of you may not see it that way. Twenty years after the Reagan Era, when movies told us "greed is good" and many people believed that if someone was rich, that person must be a better person than someone who wasn't, things like "truth" and "honor" may seem like horribly outdated concepts.

In 1963, in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil." Her thesis was that many of the great wrongs of history, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by psychopaths or sociopaths but by ordinary people.

Arendt understood that Adolf Hitler and other great instigators were certainly evil, but in many cases, the people who actually carried out their orders -- the ones who actually did the killing -- were little more than bureaucrats or minor functionaries.

Nothing better describes the banality of evil than the statement, "I was only following orders," and there are few better examples than the bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.

I'm certainly not equating what has been happening in business -- all the downsizing and budget cutting that has affected so many lives -- to the Holocaust, but if you work for someone who lacks honor, it sears your soul.

I'm purposely not mentioning any names here. Those of you who know me well know where I worked and who my former boss was. He wasn't any fearsome troll, just a short, balding little man with a family and a mortgage who was doing what his boss wanted. And the fact that I have occasional nightmares about what happened just tells me how lucky I am not to be there anymore.

These days I work only for my wife -- taking care of her and cooking meals -- and myself. I'm writing a book that has nothing to do with my career or what happened to me, and it is a joy to work on.

I'm healing and I'm lucky. I'm reasonably well off and nearing retirement age, so I will never again work for people I can't respect, people who lack a sense of honor.

I have no critical feelings toward people who do so because they need their jobs to support their families. I'm realistic. We can't all just say no, even to the banality of evil.

But I sure am glad I can.