“Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I’m trying to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life, every week.”

It is on this optimistic, high-vibe note that my favorite host, Robert Evans, welcomes listeners. And don’t you dare expect things to be any less grim in this article! Produced by Cool Zone Media, Behind the Bastards delves into the lives of some of the worst people to have ever plagued humanity and marks more than a million downloads monthly.

As I am writing, I am literally hooked on their “light-hearted” six-part series on Nazi SS leader Heindrich Himmler, the first three episodes of which I listened to twice, since I imposed the podcast on a 7-hour road trip to Italy last weekend…

Admirable as it is, my dedication to knowing ridiculous facts about Nazi leaders is not unique. Bad guys (and gals) are just way more fascinating than good people, aren’t they? The popularity of this podcast, but also our broader cultural obsession with the true crime genre, Ted Bundy documentaries, or Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries, show us just how engrossed we are in the quest of understanding evil_. Archives, testimonies, diaries and all methods a biographer employs, allow us to examine people’s past and analyze what factors led them to the monstrosities they committed. But also – when they weren’t committing the horrific acts we know them for, in what ways were they humans and not monsters.

"[Ridiculous stories] … puncture the myths. We mythologize and make these people into just these huge icons of, you know, Darth Vader type of people. And actually, they have bowel problems."

Saddam Hussein – Iraq’s authoritarian dictator between 1979 and 2003, had a side career as an erotic romance novelist, while Adolf Hitler had a life-long obsession with cringy young adult novels about cowboys in the American wild west… And oh boy, am I a sucker for knowing the most random facts about these assholes and many more – Tzar Nicholas II, Jeffrey Epstein, King Leopold of Belgium or Steve Jobs? I say SPILL. THE. TEA.

Several years of listening to Evans’s excruciatingly detailed episodes and filling my precious brain space with darkness, have left me wondering: How do we grapple with this contrast, most often as humorous as it is disturbing, between somebody’s day-to-day humanity and their evilness?

Answering this question means zooming out to the bigger picture of Evil and History – but first, we need to set the stage with some baseline definitions.

In Behind the Bastards, Robert Evans doesn’t shy away from throwing around phrases such as “worst people in history”, “bastards”, “monsters”, “evil”, and so forth. And there is beauty in these words being intuitive – after all, I don’t need anybody to linguistically justify themselves in calling Hitler a bad person. Please go ahead and do that. However, understanding the philosophical traditions of thinking about evil helps us understand the implicit connotations evil-related terms carry.

Willfully Problematic: Evil as Personal Agency

Let’s take the word bastard – in its literal, historic sense it refers to an illegitimate child, one born outside of lawful marriage. Today, Urban Dictionary gives us the following definition:

Derogatory for a willfully problematic person not only intent on not helping anyone but himself, but doing things to hinder others.

Modern-day bastardness can thus be directly linked to Emmanuel Kant’s definition of evil from Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (1973), where he describes evil as an innate human propensity to subordinate the moral law to self-interest.

The connotation behind both definitions frame the notions as individualistic – a deliberate inversion of moral principles of any one person, who uses their freedom to harm others and benefit themselves.

When Evil Becomes Systematic

While it is often tempting to point a finger at bad guys and think, well, they simply were willfully problematic, another approach often juxtaposed to the individualistic view is what Hannah Arendt coined the banality of evil. In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt reported on Nazi official Adolf Eichmann’s trial for his crimes against humanity, as he led the logistical operation of sending Jewish people to concentration camps and ghettos. What was shocking at the time is that she depicted him as banal, as a normal guy who wasn’t a terrifying anti-semite monster himself, but rather a boring bureaucrat following orders and organizing logistics.

*Small caveat: the accuracy of her work has since been heavily criticized, notably by Bettina Stangneth who wrote Eichmann Before Jerusalim in 2011. Stangneth as well as many other historians have shown that Eichmann was anything but a banal bureaucratic participant in the mass extermination of Jews. Evidence shows he was a deeply involved, intentional and driven leader in the evils committed.

That being said – the term banality of evil itself is still a very useful definition to describe the human tendency to willingly participate in systems, which bring about atrocious crimes against humanity, without getting most individual’s “hands dirty.” A better example might be an Amazon employee who is working on fixing an AWS cloud feature to be used by the Israeli military.

This contrast between a monster versus a banal contributor shows the extremes of the two ways in which people tend to understand evil – either as the result of individual agency, or as embedded within persistent historical and social structures.

Both Things Can Be True

What I love about Behind the Bastards is that Evans actually often focuses exactly on this duality in historiography. Most nightmarish acts are both the result of certain individual choices and maliciousness, as well as of the deeply-rooted structural predispositions. Sometimes within a one-hour-and-a-half episode we hear only about the political context of a country, or certain family history – maaayybe part of the reason why my friends on the Italy roadtrip hated me…

But the highly detailed stories allow for listeners to understand the various dynamics between these factors depending on the bastard. Some had objectively traumatizing, grim childhood experiences as well as lived in an era, which predisposed them to an extent to which it would be surprising to say the least, if they turned out to become decent law-abiding citizens. Others, on the contrary, were not necessarily destined to be monsters.

Adolf Eichmann, for instance, grew up in a milieu where family members and friends had married into Jewish families, with whom he had interacted many times. Yet, later on one of his personal obsessions became ensuring that no individual Jews are exempted from the final solution, that no SS members were saving “a good Jew” here and there. Meanwhile, even Hitler intervened to save his childhood Jewish doctor! When it comes to his “day-to-day humanity” , the podcast has short-lived moments, in which it makes me slightly empathetic towards some of the worst people in history, but more often than not it feeds me more reasons to despise humanity (and let’s be real, especially men). I don’t feel that bad knowing that nobody wanted to sit with Eichmann at lunchtime in the Nazi party headquarters knowing that he went out of his way to be a bastard and police other people (who were already pretty terrible) to make sure they did not get a moment of softness, God forbid!

Sometimes, it can be as simple as that. Sometimes, people just suck. There I said it. (*me imagining receiving a Pulitzer prize for this brave thought*)

Other bastards, like Heindrich Himmler, teach me something else – like, the fragility and societal danger ordinary insecure weirdos pose to our world.

While also a very intentional bastard, don’t get me wrong – it seems like if Heinrich Himmler were to be born in a different time and place, could have just become a toxic nerd obsessed with discussing Lord of the Rings on Reddit, and playing Dungeons and Dragons (not that these interests are toxic in themselves).

“If Gebhardt was raising Heinrich Himmler today, Heinrich would be sitting on his lap as he sends death threats to Disney for putting women in Star Wars. That is the kind of dude.”

Boy was deeply consumed by stories of magic and knights, which is totally fine, I do not claim otherwise. But as an example – J. R. R. Tolkien used his interest in Germanic myths and mysticism to create a fictional world. While Himmler, reading the same heroic tales that inspired Tolkien_,_ made sense of his real world by… imagining himself to be the reincarnation of an old Germanic prince??? Which obsession then led to ugh… some wild conclusions about race purity and we all know how the story ends.

A Lot to Just Goggle At

Not to say we should be suspicious of all people interested in mysticism, paganism, or esoterics today…(ok, maybe just a little). Yet, hey, Hitler being into cowboy novels and Saddam Hussein into erotica doesn’t mean I will proclaim all people with similar hobbies as potential threats to humanity.

Nonetheless, it is just interesting to sit down and let yourself be transported into the past worlds from this perspective of weird facts that – well, sometimes mean something, sometimes not. While the beautiful layer of absurdity doesn’t always find proof of somebody being destined to become evil, does it mean a detailed biographical approach with a special focus on their quirks, is a useless endeavor? No!

I believe the ridiculous stories add so much color to these people’s lives and just gives you a deeper understanding of the world, reflecting on things you would have never ever thought about. And to be honest there is a lot to just goggle at.

So where does this leave us in our quest to better understand evil? Who knows, but I know my soul will only be at peace about a hundred years after I die, knowing that I did not make it on Robert Evan’s bastard list. Or that I made it on one of the yearly Christmas special non-bastard episodes! That’s all one can morally strive for. Being a Non-Bastard, innit?