Karens, Nazis & the Morality of Evil

A response to Erik Hoel’s timely essay

Human beings, unwithheld by shame, for they were unbeheld of their fellows, ventured on deeds of greater wickedness, or gave way more readily to their abject fears. Deeds of heroism also occurred, whose very mention swells the heart & brings tears into the eyes. Such is human nature, that beauty & deformity are often closely linked.

Mary Shelley, The Last Man

Okay. First off, I know what you’re thinking: not all Karens are Nazis. In fact, none of them are, because the National Socialist German Worker’s Party no longer exists.

I recently had the pleasure of reading the American neuroscientist Erik Hoel’s essay, “Karens and the Nature of Evil,”¹ a beautifully written, well-argued portrait of contemporary American society. If Hoel’s account of the USA rings true, it would appear that despite recent and important developments in non-binary thinking and language, the world seems to be becoming frighteningly dualistic once again.     

In the puritanical USA of today, terms like “good,” “evil,” “Karen” and “nazi” have made an epic comeback. Across the political spectrum, all forms of moralistic thought are being taken to their extreme logical conclusions. Few people dare discuss much of anything resembling real-life anymore, for fears of being deemed a heretic by one side or the other. These days, the subjects of sex, gender, money, ethnicity, politics, and philosophy have become off limits for fear of saying the “wrong thing,” resulting in an environment where barstool statements are either considered cancellable or canon, where sanctimonious expressions of feelings now pass for knowledge—or worse, wisdom.

It would appear many Americans have reverted to an age-old pastime, bigotry, in painting vast swaths of the population as “us” versus “them.” And before you think you’re on the “right” side of this comparison, I’d like to tell you, you might not be, because we’re all a part of the problem—it isn’t just the conservatives or the leftists.  Because you think “they” are “fascists” who burn books and want to destroy society, or whether “they” are “fascist woke police” who want to destroy “democracy,” the point is, the lines in the sand have been drawn, and everyone’s angry, and the only question that seems to matter to anymore is, “Whose side are you on?”

To echo Erik Hoel, I’d simply like to suggest we’re facing a far more pressing question.

The thing about this type of binary thinking is, it doesn’t end well, and in Hoel’s essay, he makes a point not to fall into the trap of choosing sides. Instead, he illuminates the possibility for oscillating in between the two extremes.

Instead of seeking to demonize the “Karen” that berated him for leaving his dog in his car in a parking lot, Hoel borrows the term to symbolize a deeper truth about the USA’s renewed puritanical obsession with moralism, which seeks to define the world in binary terms of "right” and “wrong,” “left” and “right,” “red” and “blue,” “good” and “evil,” “woke” and “racist,” “right” and “wrong,” etc. But like so many other words that have lost their meaning in this century, terms like “nazi” and “Karen” and “fascist” and “evil” have become interchangeable when referring to any moralistic stance that pits “us” against “them.”

Hoel’s interpretation of the term “Karen” is an eloquent alternative to this conundrum:

“The Karen meme serves a necessary and important function, specifcally because of a naivety deep in American culture. For what American culture lacks most is an adult understanding of what motivates evil […] what evil actually is, most often, is good corrupted.”

Okay. I can sense what you might be thinking: people like you and me, we know what “good” really means; the problem isn’t us, it’s them.

I hate to break it to you, but all of us are at risk of becoming “Karens.”

Karens and the nature of evil

Okay. Sure. I know what you might be thinking: according to the Internet, “Karens” are self-righteous, middle-aged, middle-class, suburban white Americans. But this is just a stereotype. What Hoel makes clear is that anybody can be a “Karen,” regardless of political affiliation, gender, creed, or ethnicity—“Karens” are simply self-righteous moralists who believe they are so fundamentally “good” that they must stop “evil” wherever they see it.²

Hoel takes this a step further, and I happen to agree with him, by suggesting that “evil” is primarily the result of extreme moralism, and he uses the western world’s most obvious example of “evil” to illustrate his point:  

“Hitler’s strong sense of morality was the cause of the evil he sowed, and his beliefs about killing the “bad guys” and not eating meat [Hitler was a vegetarian] were, from his perspective, never in contradiction.  […] Despite the slippery nature of this truth, the knowledge of moralism being the root of evil runs like a vein of ore through western culture, rediscovered over and over.”

Before continuing (and especially if you disagree with this premise) consider this question (it might be a test):

Question: What did the Crusades and the Protestant Reformation and Colonialization and British imperialism and the African Slave Trade and Manifest Destiny and the Armenian Genocide and Jim Crow Laws and the Nuremberg Laws and Stalin’s gulags and Japanese Internment Camps and Hiroshima and the Holocaust and the Great Leap Forward and the Vietnam War and the two Iraq Wars and 9/11 and the Uyghur Genocide and Putin’s Denazification De-Satanization of Ukraine and one thousand other human catastrophes have in common?³

Human, all too human

 “After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers, but he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright.”  Viktor Frankl

I hold a BA and MA in Holocaust Studies and recently finished a novel about the Nazi occupation of Poland, history versus memory, and what happens when people believe in the myth of “good” versus “evil.”

Ever since my eight-year-old-self climbed up on a bookshelf to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I’ve been fascinated with the darker sides of the human condition. There are few more disturbing examples than Nazi Germany’s open-air shootings of almost two million human beings during the Second World War, which ended up being the subject of my master’s dissertation.

My research focused on a specific example of how a group of “ordinary” men became mass murderers. I relied on the social theories of two renowned Viennese psychoanalysts, Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl, to better understand how so many average citizens became seasoned killers. Both Adler and Frankl were protégés of Sigmund Freud, and though their work was grounded in humanistic psychology (primarily focusing on human potential), I used Adler’s theory of the inferiority complex and resulting will to power and Frankl’s belief in the will to meaning and the existential vacuum to better understand the notorious case of Reserve Police Battalion 101 (RPB 101 hereafter).

Of the rank and file studied in historian Christopher Browning’s groundbreaking book, Ordinary Men, only 25% were Nazi Party members, their average age was thirty-nine, 35% were white-collar workers, mostly in sales of some sort, and 63% were from working class background (dockworkers, truck drivers, waiters et cetera.). The vast majority stopped schooling around the age of fifteen, and “by age, geographical origin, and social background, the men […] were least likely considered apt material out of which to mold future mass killers.” But on July 13, 1942, when the battalion commander gave his men a unique opportunity to opt out of massacring 1,500 women, children and elderly in Józefów, Poland, only twelve men refused, 80% followed orders until the end, and by the end of the war, RPB 101 had murdered approximately 38,000 human beings.

My findings about why so many of the men committed mass murder were disturbing, but not surprising. What follows is a condensed and revised version of my research, because sooner or later, each of us has to face up to the fact that just like there exists a Karen within all of us, so too exists a killer, and ignoring this reality only exacerbates the very real dangers we face in an increasingly hyper-moralist and dualistic world.

The Humanness of Cruelty

A 2013 MA dissertation (University College London)

The inferiority complex and subsequent social feeling are foundational to Alfred Adler’s theory. The social feeling arises because human beings are weak. In order to overcome this weakness, human beings must cooperate. Citing Charles Darwin, Adler suggests weak animals are never found living alone. Consequently, “It is the feeling of inferiority, inadequacy and insecurity which determine the goal of an individual’s existence.”⁴

Adolf Hitler had an inferiority complex that masqueraded as one of superiority. But for the Nazis, being human didn’t simply mean being powerful or “Aryan,” it also meant directing the individual will to power towards the benefit of the “people’s community,” the Volksgemeinschaft. To be “good” in Nazi society meant to be good towards the in-group; to be bad in Nazi society meant to be at odds with “the people’s community.”

The German historian Thomas Kühne has done important work on the ways in which shame culture, group conformity, and an “us” versus “them” mentality led to the Holocaust. In his astute analysis, “humanity, selflessness, mutual solicitude, security, even affection, were not foreign to [the community]. They just remained confined in general to one’s own group.”⁵ Similarly, in accordance with Alfer Adler’s social theory, an individualistic will to power poses the greatest threat to civilization, and the best way to combat this is through education and by directing it towards a socially interested goal.

The inferiority complex invariably leads to a selfish will to power, which must then be sublimated into what Adler deems the social feeling. In summary, "to be good means to be good towards others, and to be bad means to be bad towards others."⁶[3] In Nazi society, the Volksgemeinschaft was this social feeling, based on a mythological idea of the “Aryan race,” which, conveniently, was the supreme “race” within the Nazis’ taxonomy of lesser “races” (I wish I didn’t feel the need to say this, but call it a sign of the times: you know, right, that only one type of human “race” exists?).

Guilt versus. Shame culture

“There is a moral justification in which mass murder is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it as serving socially worthy or moral purposes. Perpetrators may believe this rationalization to such an extent that their evil is not only morally justifiable (right to do), but becomes an outright moral imperative (wrong not to do it).

James E Waller, “The Ordinariness of Extraordinary Evil”

In Nazi Germany, working towards the Volksgemeinschaft was viewed as the highest form of morality. To understand the mutated Nazi social feeling, it is first necessary to understand the difference between guilt culture and shame culture, a distinction best articulated in an essay by Thomas Kühne.⁷

In shame culture, morality is defined by the community, not the individual. “[Within guilt culture] the question of morals is a case for introspection. Guilt is experienced individually. It is dealt with in dialogue with God or with the superego.”[2] In shame culture, however, the community is seen as the highest “good,” meaning those who do not contribute to the community are viewed as fundamentally “evil. Individual responsibilities make way for collective ones when morality is defined by the community. Not surprisingly, in my research I found that many men in RPB 101 who refused to shoot were more ashamed of their individual “weakness” than proud of their moral “goodness” for stepping away.

Paradoxically, when the men in RPB 101 were given a choice not to kill, it only served to highlight the importance of group conformity. “If the question is posed to me as to why I shot with the others in the first place,” one RPB 101 policeman admitted, “I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward.”

By providing the men with a choice, “weak” individuals were forced to identify themselves, but being thought of as “selfish” or “weak” was the extent of the punishment. (Testimony of those who declined to shoot soundly refutes any argument that those who refused would be punished. There is no historical evidence of a single German being punished for refusing to participate in mass murder. In the words of one RPB 101 policemen, 

“It was in no way the case that those who did not want to or could not carry out the shooting of human beings with their own hands could not keep themselves out of this task. […] [Other men] showered me with remarks such as ‘shit-head’ and ‘weakling’ to express their disgust. But I suffered no consequences for my actions.”

Although over 80% of the RPB 101 policemen participated in mass murder in Józefów, not only did they have a choice, they were also given one, and the “punishment” of those who refused was temporary derision. When faced with the reality of murdering 1,500 elderly, women and children with a gunshot to the nape of the neck, many of the RPB 101 shooters became convinced that carrying out their grisly duty was proof that they could remain “good” and human in spite of it all.  “That was the morality of shame culture,” Thomas Kühne concludes. “The good and morally right person was the one who, regardless of personal scruples, uncertainties or anxieties, unswervingly did what the community did and kept ‘faith’ with it.

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.” Ervin Staub, social psychologist

In July 1961, in the basement of a Yale University building, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram set out to understand how ordinary people can commit mass murder. Milgram set out to understand how “good” people could commit mass murder by testing the effects of peer pressure and obedience to authority. 65% of the test subjects—just as “ordinary” as the men in RPB 101—were willing to electrocute an innocent with up to 450 volts (a fatal shock) when told to do so by an authority figure:

“If a system of death camps were set up in the United States,” Milgram concluded, “One would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”

Seven years later, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a schoolteacher in Iowa named Jane Elliott set out to teach her students about bigotry. She told all of her brown-eyed students that they were better than the blue-eyed students. Within hours, the brown-eyed children became arrogant, bossy, and bigoted. The next day, Elliott reversed the roles, telling the blue-eyed students that in fact they were superior. While the new “chosen ones” did take a certain pleasure in their newfound superiority, their prejudice was less pronounced after having experienced the effects of discrimination the day before.

What’s most surprising about our ability to be cruel is that it continues to surprise us. In August 1971, at Stanford University, just one month after The Pentagon Papers revealed the USA’s brutal civilian bombing campaign in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, a psychologist named Philip Zimbardo set out to see how ordinary people’s “goodness” might mutate when placed in a position of power.

Zimbardo built a makeshift prison in a Stanford University basement and selected two groups of volunteers: “guards” and “prisoners.” Within hours, Zimbardo declared the simulation was “a sufficient condition to produce aberrant, anti-social behavior.” Zimbardo himself became megalomaniacal in his role, and even resisted shutting down the experiment (he ended up marrying the woman who convinced him to stop). "Most dramatic and distressing to us,” Zimbardo concluded, “was the observation of the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited in individuals who were not sadistic ‘types.’”

However, there’s a fine line between acknowledging the Adlerian types of social, psychological, and environmental factors and reducing the human condition to the sum of biological, environmental, and psychological conditioning processes. While human beings are invariably affected by all of the aforementioned factors, dismissing human behavior as only a result of these conditioning processes robs us of the very “humanity” we rely on to hold mass murderers accountable for their actions.

Humanity’s Search for Meaning

“The uniqueness of humanity, our humanness does not contradict the fact that in the psychological and biological dimensions we are still animals.” Viktor Frankl

Enter Viktor Frankl’s existentialist theory known as logotherapy. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Viktor Frankl was a professor of neurology and psychiatry in Vienna. By the time he was liberated from Auschwitz in 1945, most of his family was dead, but this didn’t prevent him from writing Man’s Search for Meaning ten days after his liberation, a foundational text in humanistic psychology that remains the most important book I have ever read.

Unlike Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl rejected the premise that human behavior could be reduced to the satisfaction of drives and gratification or sublimation of instincts. “If we are to bring out the human potential at its best,” Frankl wrote, “we must first believe in its existence and presence.”⁸ Once we reduce the human condition to the exclusive result of conditioning processes, it makes it all but impossible for us to recognize the more unique aspects of our humanity. This doesn’t mean that psychological, biological, and environmental factors do not dictate much of human behavior—it means that these are not exhaustive explanations for our actions.

Frankl puts it quite clearly: there is “more to being human than being a pawn and plaything of conditioning processes or drives and instincts.”⁹ While the animal homo sapiens is concerned with success versus failure and pleasure versus pain, homo patiens, the suffering human, is concerned with meaning and fulfilment in the face of what Frankl calls the existential vacuum.

The Existential Vacuum

“God is dead, and we have killed him […] what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? […] How shall we comfort ourselves, the murders of all murderers? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” Friedrich Nietzsche

The existential vacuum is a result of two phenomena: our uniquely human existential neurosis (i.e., we are conscious of mortality, and we seek meaning in life) and a societal neurosis related to modernity, the Nietzschean “Death of God” and the resulting sense of meaninglessness (nihilism).

In this modern age, according to Viktor Frankl, “people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”¹⁰ Lacking traditional directives of what we must do (according to drives and instincts), and not knowing what we should do (according to retrograde traditions and values), we often don’t even know what we want to do, creating a situation in which we either do what others do (conformism) in hopes of finding meaning, or we do what others tell us to do (totalitarianism) in hopes of finding purpose.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Let’s consider the two current American examples of hyper-moralism: “wokeness” and “Trumpism.” In the former, people who define themselves as “woke” are paradoxically those most likely to have fascistic ideas about what “should” and “shouldn’t” be done, said, or thought. For all of the undeniable social benefits of the “woke movement” (in my mind, its insistence on the non-binary nature of gender—and so too existence—is a genuine revolution), these days, to be “woke” means little more than conforming to the latest linguistic, ideological, and performative tenets of virtue signalling and political correctness.

As for “Trumpism,” whose dogmatic principles exist at the other extreme of the political spectrum, bigotry and authoritarianism have become synonymous with “morality” and “freedom.” To return to Frankl’s theory, when a societal-wide sense of purposelessness becomes the norm, meaninglessness arises, sounding the dog whistle for all types of didactic moralists who really, really want to prove that “they” are “good” and “others” are “evil.”

We’ve seen this before. Similar types of opposing sacrosanct moralists wrought havoc in the former Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, 1930s France, Communist China, and most importantly for the purposes of this essay, Nazi Germany.

Once the Nazis’ particular set of moral codes was legally defined in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, average citizens who felt they had to protect the “community” from an existential threat (“Jews,” “Communists,” “Asocials,” etc.) were able to redefine “good” and “evil” in terms of making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the “community,” regardless of individual moral scruples.

In the words of one member of a Nazi mobile killing unit, “Our faith in the Führer fulfills us and gives us the strength to carry out our difficult and thankless task […] Suspicious looks should not however divert us from the knowledge that what we are doing is necessary.”¹¹Or, in the disturbing, all-too-human words of Heinrich Himmler, doing what was necessary for the “community” gave Nazi killers a profound sense of existential meaning: “All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character.”¹²

The case of RPB 101 remains important because it shows how and why ordinary people can so easily become mass murderers. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) convincingly rejects the myth of “evil,” dismissing sweeping clichés and regressive notions of Nazi caricatures that serve more to justify “our” goodness than to understand “their” evil. Psychological, biological, and environmental influences notwithstanding, a choice always exists, which is why we reserve the right to condemn.

Conclusion

“He who has a Why can bear almost any How.” Friedrich Nietzsche

To amend the famous words of Friedrich Nietzsche up above, “he who has a Why can bear or commit almost any How.” Indeed, the humanness of cruelty is precisely this: our obsession with morality is often at the root of what makes us “evil,” because that which makes us “evil” is also what makes us human.

One hundred years ago, Benito Mussolini, a former communist-turned-fascist, marched on Rome with tens of thousands of black-shirted Italians and promptly seized power. His revolutionary political platform sought to define a new kind of morality and national identity, which offered simple solutions for a confusing and complicated world (in the coming weeks, I will share an essay detailing how exactly this happened).    

History repeats itself in unexpected ways. In 2016, the United States elected Donald Trump, a bigoted nationalist and white supremacist, to the presidency. In 2022, France’s far right nationalist party, the National Rally, celebrated its largest parliamentary victory in history. A few months later, Italy elected its first female prime minister in history; and if Georgia Meloni were a leftist, many of us would be championing her victory in the name progress, but alas, she represents the far right, and so we shake our heads at the uncomfortable truth about “progress,” which is that moralistic “progress,” just like “evil,” does not exist.

One hundred years after the original rise of fascism, our primordial human anxieties have returned, fueled by economic disillusionment, material emptiness, existential loneliness, and the spiritual need for a mythological community. Inevitably, this has given rise in the USA to a hyper-moral, sanctimonious “left” and a bigoted, nationalistic “right” as well as renewed forms of religious fundamentalism and stab-in-the-back theories that seek to explain how we “good” people have been led astray.

The steadfast belief in “good” and “evil” is humanity at its most predictable and its most dangerous. There is always hope, but hope is a verb, and it is forever oscillating between the extremes of idealism and nihilism. Most politicians these days are pandering to the worst sides of human nature, more interested in demonizing the “other side” with flag-waving and moral righteousness, banking on the logical conclusion of capitalism’s commodification of the self: an existential vacuum to be filled by populist cults of personality and hordes of followers seeking validation through comparison.

Erik Hoel is teaching us something important about the term “Karens.” It represents the human condition at its basest, one singularly concerned with “good” and “bad.” Whichever side of the spectrum you think you fall, remember that none of us is immune to the pitfalls of moralism. Because the truth is, there is a “Karen” that lurks within all of us. The more we ignore them, the faster we succumb to the anger, loneliness, and aggression that accompanies the all too human delusion that “good” and “evil” still exist. 

If you enjoyed this essay, you’ll probably what I wrote about literature, modernism, postmodernism, & metamodernism:

Why I’m Not Over Dead French Writers Just Yet

1. Karens and the nature of evil

2. “Karens” exist in all shapes, creeds, and sizes. I’m reminded of a decidedly different kind of “Karen” conversation I had in 2016, with a group of prominent faculty members from a renowned American university. Trumpism was looming, and I was saddened, but not surprised, by the abject disdain with which this group of highly-educated, progressive, humanistic adults spoke of how “the other side” was “ruining the country,” and how the Republican Party was made up of “monsters” and “jackasses” and “fascists” and “evil doers.” I’d heard this kind of rhetoric before, and while I didn’t necessarily disagree with it (especially now—but therein lies the problem, innit?), I felt it was my moral duty to say something. “We should be careful with the kind of language we use when speaking about the other side,” I said timidly. “It’s one of the first steps in dehumanization, after all, calling ‘the other’ names, refusing to acknowledge their subjectivity.” And therein lies the problem: I felt morally superior, because I felt I had done the right thing.

3. Answer: In every single example, the human architects of these calamities believed they were doing something “good.”

4. Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature

5. Thomas Kühne, “Male Bonding and Shame Culture: Hitler’s Soldiers and the Moral Basis of Genocidal Warfare,” in Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives

6. Alfred Adler, “The Meaning of Life,” The Lancet, 217 (1931)

7. Thomas Kühne, “Male Bonding and Shame Culture”

8. Viktor E. Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy & Humanism

9. Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning.

10. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

11. Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders

12. Yitzhak Arad et al., Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union