In her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil" to describe how mind-boggling atrocities could be committed by ordinary people who conform to rules without examining their actions critically. Arendt coined the term while reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi official who had organised the logistics of the Holocaust. Arendt's point was that Eichmann had not displayed extreme hatred or malice; instead, he had acted like an ordinary, career-minded bureaucrat who claimed that he was simply doing his job by obeying orders. Eichmann had made evil banal. That was his contribution to German history.

Arendt came to mind while I was reading an analysis of violence in Bangladesh in The Daily Star recently. It is by the intellectually irrepressible Asif Bin Ali, a doctoral scholar who is one of the paper's star columnists. (Pun intended.)

Asif Bin Ali writes: "How does a society arrive at a point where 20 people can beat one person while another 50 stand around watching? Some film it. Some encourage it. And once the person is dead, somebody still finds a way to say: he was a thief, he said something about religion, he must have done something."

No one can argue or is arguing that Bangladesh is anywhere close to Nazi Germany: Perish the thought. However, normalised violence begets the banality of evil over time. It has to. That is the point.

Asif makes the point in his own inimitable way. First, he speaks of dystopia. "It begins when things that should horrify us start becoming routine... Something that should trouble a society for months survives for a day in the news cycle."

Second, he cites the philosopher Michel Foucault's idea of governmentality, "how governance over time can shape people to willingly self-govern and control their behaviour". Asif explains: "Most of us don't base our decision to hurt someone on whether the police are watching. There are boundaries inside us as well. Family, school, teachers, religion, neighbourhood, culture, journalism and politics all have some role in drawing those boundaries. If I suspect somebody of stealing, I may want that person handed to the police. That is very different from believing I am entitled to beat him to death. Somewhere between those two responses sits a social limit. A functioning society depends on millions of such limits. And I think that part of our social life has weakened."

Third, Asif recalls the French sociologist Émile Durkheim's use of the word "anomie". "People obey rules partly because punishment exists, but also because those rules make sense to them and carry some moral authority. Trouble begins when the old rules have lost that authority and nothing broadly trusted has taken their place. The rules still exist, but people simply stop being sure who has the right to enforce them, or even where the limits really are."

Asif's conclusion: "So, when I ask how we became this kind of society, I keep returning to three ideas: governmentality, anomie and dystopia. They are connected in a fairly simple way. Society depends partly on people governing themselves and recognising limits. When confidence in those limits weakens, anomie grows. And when violence, distrust, revenge and the cheapening of human life settle into everyday life, dystopia no longer feels like a fictional word. It is not only the state failing. Society is failing too."

Society, too, is failing because the state is failing. Those are wise words. The road to the banality of evil is a two-way street.

What lies at the end of the road? It is the "evil of banality", to mention a phrase used in an article by Professor Emeritus Sukanta Chaudhuri of Jadavpur University who was my tutor for the English Honours course at Presidency College, Kolkata, in the 1970s. Writing in The Telegraph, he argues against a. situation in which "serious and often pernicious implications are attached to matters that by any balanced assessment must count as marginal, possibly long dead... This forcible conversion of the personal into the public, thrusting a generic identity upon the individual, is a grotesque change of scale that gives a new disturbing meaning to the illicit valorization of the trivial. What could have been, and till the other day commonly was, an undemanding pursuit of the lives we wished to lead, concerning no one but ourselves, is now caught in the glare of implicit if not open surveillance by an external social collective... In other words, banal things have taken on the taint of evil, their very banality an added sinister trait: it shows how far the evil has percolated... If trivial details are aggrandized to work violence and mischief, it behoves us to keep track of such details and send them back to obscurity. When banality grows evil, it is no longer banal. It is simply evil."

The banality of evil leads finally to the evil of banality.

Then, the known world begins to end, not with an evil bang but with a banal whimper.

Let us all beware.

The writer is the Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation.