We want there to be a line: us on one side, the people who do monstrous things on the other. This episode is about how thin that line actually is. It opens in a Polish field in July 1942, where about five hundred middle-aged reservists were offered a no-penalty way out of a massacre and almost none of them took it — the case at the heart of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. From there it works through Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil," then does the harder thing and admits her own example may have been compromised: Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem suggests Eichmann performed the banal bureaucrat he was accused of being. We give Milgram's famous 65% the asterisk it earned — one variation among many, obedience swinging from near-zero to near-total. And we land on the lesson that runs through all of it: the variabl ...