Arendt’s “banality of evil” is not a claim that evil is small. It is a claim that mass violence can be carried out by people who look ordinary, speak in bureaucratic clichés, and treat murder as procedure. The danger is thoughtlessness, routinization, and careerism. 2/

Milgram in the showed how far ordinary people will go when an authority figure defines harm as legitimate work. Many subjects obeyed all the way, despite visible distress. His point was not sadism, but compliance, and how responsibility shifts upward when “I was told to” feels sufficient. 3/

Zimbardo argued that roles and environments can reshape behaviour. Uniforms, hierarchy, surveillance, and humiliation produced escalating abuse, even among “normal” volunteers. The lesson is situational power, institutions manufacture cruelty through permission and control. 4/ www.prisonexp.org

Browning’s study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows how average men became mass shooters through peer pressure, conformity, and step by step escalation. Many were not ideological fanatics. The key dynamic was social belonging, fear of standing apart, and adapting to a violent new norm. 5/

Bandura argues that perpetrators preserve a “good person” self image while doing harm. They use euphemisms, displace responsibility, minimize consequences, and blame victims. Violence becomes easier when language sanitizes it, and when targets are framed as dangerous or undeserving of empathy. 6/

Kelman & Hamilton argue that atrocities are often produced by normal administrative processes. Authority legitimizes violence, routines make it ordinary, and responsibility is diffused across a chain of command. People comply because the system defines the act as appropriate, dissent as disloyal. 7/

Staub treats political violence as a process, not a switch. Crisis generates frustration, leaders scapegoats, small harms become acceptable, then escalate. Bystanders adapt, perpetrators learn, and institutions reward aggression. Violence grows through normalization and shrinking moral concern. 8/

Waller integrates multiple layers of perpetration. Ordinary people become capable of extraordinary harm through identity and group belonging, obedience and authority, moral disengagement, and social rewards. His emphasis is interaction, not one cause, but pressures that produce perpetrators. 9/

Semelin helps explain why mass killing so often involves cruelty, not just death. Cruelty can be psychologically functional, it dehumanizes victims so perpetrators can protect their own sense of humanity. Once victims are cast as non human, escalation becomes easier, and stopping unthinkable. 10/

Becker’s argument is existential. Humans fear mortality, and we manage that fear by attaching ourselves to meaning systems that promise symbolic immortality. In extreme contexts, violence can be reframed as sacred duty or historical mission, turning killing into a path toward purpose. 11/

Finally, many micro theories converge on fear and humiliation. Perpetrators often believe they are averting an attack, stopping contamination, or regaining dignity. These emotions invert morality: violence becomes “defense,” restraint becomes betrayal, and victims become existential threats. 12/

None of these theories excuse perpetrators. They show how state murder is produced through ordinary motives, belonging, obedience, fear, humiliation, and bureaucratic routine. What matters is the mechanism: obedience, moral disengagement, diffusion of responsibility, and escalation. 13/