I wonder if she read The Screwtape Letters' 1961 preface, "I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."
Those quiet men sometimes harbor the wildest evils in their hearts and in their minutes.
In the Star Wars novel Darth Plagueis, there is a lot of evil going on, and very little of it thuggish. The closest we come to thuggish evil are in a scene where Plagueis and Sidious are ritually killing natives of a backwater planet, and in Maul's role as a proto-Emperor's-Hand minus Mara Jade's cultural sophistication.
ReplyDeleteMeetings and Senate sessions are where Sidious and Plagueis do a lot of their evil.