How do ordinary citizens become the foot soldiers, the automatons, the purveyors of evil? How does barbaric cruelty become a civic norm? In her controversial classic Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt gives us a way to understand this pervasive degeneration of our time. She calls it the banality of evil. And it is this banality given democratic license; this turning of neglect into a legitimate doctrine of governance; this virtuosity of brutalism without bloodshed, that Aishwary Kumar identifies as a new mutation in the structure of liberal democracy. Neodemocracy is this political mutant, born at the intersection of cruelty and the constitution.
“At the heart of law is not justice but the will to punish. And it is when this will to punish becomes a pervasive...
Not only does violence have the capacity to become normative, we also seem to wholly lose our capacity for moral judgement in its wake....
Nothing frames our thinking at Mutant — the very name we have given this dictionary of concepts — more fundamentally than the human drive...
