Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil" — the observation that mass atrocitycan be perpetrated by ordinary individuals exercising no independent moral judgment —has been invoked for over sixty years without a mechanistic account of the cognitiveprocess that produces it. This paper provides that account through predictive codingtheory. We argue that what Arendt called "thoughtlessness" is not a moral failing but thecognitive default: prediction error minimization operating within culturally constitutedgenerative models. "Thinking," in Arendt's sense of independent moral judgment,requires the costly allocation of high precision to moral prediction errors — errors thatthe brain's default processing strategy attenuates or prevents from arising altogether. Weintroduce a three-layer model of cognitive lockout: Layer 1, the precision-weightedsuppression of moral prediction errors that do arise; Layer 2, the absence of predictionerrors when harmful practices are constitutive of the social field — perceived but notarticulable as violations within any socially operative evaluative framework; and Layer3, the physical elimination of the rare individuals who achieve Layer 2 breakthroughunder violent political regimes. Applying this model to temporal moral relativity, wedemonstrate that the retrospective moral condemnation of historical atrocities and thefailure to recognize structurally identical contemporary harms are produced by the samecognitive mechanism. The culturally constructed category of "absolute evil," anchored tothe Holocaust, functions as a prediction error suppression device — concentrating moralsensitivity on a specific historical template while immunizing the generative modelagainst detecting non-matching structural analogues. We identify six contemporarypractices that instantiate the same cognitive structure — the "Eichmann structure" — andargue that the convergence of AI-driven mass unemployment, perpetual warfare, andlarge-scale migration is simultaneously reproducing all preconditions identified byArendt for totalitarian emergence, driven by accelerationism as a structurallyuncontainable ideology of no alternative. Unlike previous totalitarian transitions, thisconvergence operates at global scale with no external democratic counterweight, and itsdriving ideology — which operates through the elimination of alternatives rather thanpositive vision — cannot be defeated by defeating any state, party, or leader.
Franny Philos Sophia (Sat,) studied this question.