The Alibi of Equidistance
In an age intoxicated with absolutes, the renunciation of judgment disguises itself as prudence. Formulas like “everyone is equally bad,” “the blame is shared,” or “the truth lies in the middle” feign wisdom and superior neutrality.
These phrases conceal their own reverse: they operate as alibis designed to foreclose the demand of thought and the responsibility of judgment.
From the chapter Hannah Arendt
Judgment that refuses to be judged has already ceased to be judgment: it has turned slogan.
From the book Reason Under Siege.
Equidistance as Renunciation
Declaring the equality of evils costs less than understanding their differences. Equidistance interrupts the effort of thinking through concrete facts; sheltered by a false impartiality, it dissolves real ethical distinctions. Proclaiming neutrality before verifiable atrocities is renunciation written in a fine hand.
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1978)
Equidistance evades judgment by inertia; victimhood blocks it by imposition. In the first case, judgment is abandoned. In the second, it is forbidden from a position of moral superiority.
Victimhood as Absolute Shield
Replacing judgment with historical grievance engenders a perverse political formation: the conversion of suffering into alibi. Every criticism of the aggrieved party’s methods is immediately disqualified as complicity with the oppressor. Debate is canceled under a single slogan: How dare you equate the victim with the executioner?
Judgment demands the examination of one’s own actions; absolute victimhood dispenses with that examination. Whoever converts pain into epistemic privilege abdicates reflective responsibility. Suffering compels judgment with greater rigor; it never grants license to cease judging.
It was sheer thoughtlessness […] that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
To defend oneself is an inalienable right. To defend oneself without thinking initiates moral self-destruction. Thought draws the ethical line that checks violence before it turns autonomous and devours the cause it claimed to defend.
The Abolition of the Common World
Judgment loses its ground without a horizon of recognizable reality. Responding to a documented attack by invoking “competing narratives” erodes the factual basis of coexistence. Cynical equidistance levels verifiable facts and propaganda onto a single plane of stories: it erases the border between truth and lie.
The frivolous use of supreme legal concepts operates under identical logic. The word empties of its juridical conditions and becomes a rhetorical projectile. The accusation abandons the designation of a conduct in order to define a criminal essence: it replaces proof with prior condemnation.
Evaporated, truth cedes its entire territory to propaganda. Neutralized, judgment prepares the ground for violence.
Thinking as an Act of Resistance
The true danger lies in the passive renunciation of judging evil. Evil dispenses with monsters: it needs only individuals who repeat slogans without pausing to examine reality.
Thinking constitutes the first act of dignity in the face of horror. In that incorruptible custody, thought sustains the common world that equidistance and the slogan seek to devour.
The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1978)
Doctrinal echo: chapter Hannah Arendt of Reason Under Siege by Jimmy Baikovicius