What Makes One a Monster?

What makes a person monstrous? Not a face. Not a birth. In this video, we trace the question across more than two thousand years of philosophy and history, from Aristotle's brutishness and Plato's ring of Gyges, to Hannah Arendt's banality of evil, Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, the reserve policemen of Józefów, Albert Bandura's moral disengagement, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And we ask the question that unsettles every easy answer: what if the monster is not the opposite of us, but something we are capable of becoming? And what if every atrocity also depended on the people who could have said no? In this video: Where the word "monster" comes from, and how it moved from the body to the act Aristotle on brutishness, and why a cruel human is worse than a beast Plato's ring of Gyges and the problem of being watched Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichmann, and the banality of evil Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men and the massacre at Józefów Albert Bandura's moral disengagement and the role of dehumanization Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the creature who never got a name Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn, and Primo Levi on the monster within Further reading: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII Plato, Republic, Book II Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men Albert Bandura, "Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities" Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Primo Levi, If This Is a Man All paintings featured in this video are in the public domain. #philosophy #evil #psychology