The Cult of Technology Wants to Outsource Our Moral Judgement to Machines
Hey, it’s Chris Murphy. My new book, Crisis of the Common Good, comes out next week. It’s about America’s spiritual crisis - how we’ve lost a sense of connection to our neighbors and how the cults of profit, globalization, consumption, technology, and credentialism have made it harder to find meaning, purpose, and happiness in our lives. Below is an excerpt from the book about the danger of outsourcing the things that make us human — creativity, moral reasoning, and connection — to AI. I’m hitting the road next week to talk about all of these problems and how the left and right can come together to restore the common good. Check out the tour schedule below to see if I’ll be in a city near you.
From Crisis of the Common Good —
Hannah Arendt’s journey to a Jerusalem courtroom, where she sat in the spring of 1961 watching evil on the other side of a glass booth, was a long one. She was sixty-four years old, a German Jewish philosopher who had fled Germany during the war and had been stateless for twenty years, eventually finding refuge in America, where she became one of her adopted nation’s most formidable political thinkers. She had been sent to that courtroom by The New Yorker to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS leader who had organized the logistics of the Nazi genocide. Eichmann was in charge of the train schedules, the deportation orders, and the coordination between the ghettos and the camps that kept the extermination campaign running on time.
Arendt thought she knew what she would see on the other side of that glass: a madman, a fanatic full of vile animus for the people he sent to the slaughter. Instead, Eichmann presented as something different entirely: an anonymous functionary, a man incapable of thinking for himself. He didn’t speak of his hatred or prejudice. He coldly spoke of transport schedules and following orders. Arendt believed she was looking into the eyes of someone who could not think from the standpoint of someone else, who could not make independent moral judgments. Pursuing his self-interest, he surrendered to the system built for him. And as a result, he helped murder millions of innocent people.
I’m normally loath to make contemporary comparisons to the Nazi regime. No cult being foisted upon our nation compares to the moral horror of the Third Reich. But what Arendt witnessed that day caused her to think broadly about the danger of surrendering our moral judgment to systems designed by others—especially those who don’t have our best interests in mind, or who operate without any moral frame at all. She called it “the banality of evil.” Many readers grew angry at her apparent minimization of Eichmann’s crimes, and she may well have misunderstood Eichmann himself. But her larger point still resonates: that wrongdoing does not always arrive in a hurricane. Sometimes it is the quiet result of our surrender—the outsourcing of moral thinking and judgment to systems and authorities that spare us the burden of deciding for ourselves.
Arendt worried that the industrial age would facilitate this banality through its construction of vast, integrated systems that operated constantly and evolved incessantly, with a momentum beyond meaningful human control. She could not have imagined what we are building today: machines designed to replace not our physical effort but our mental life itself.
The outsourcing of human cognition to algorithms and large language models (LLMs)—or, more broadly, artificial intelligence (AI)—may be the greatest threat to meaning and purpose our species has ever faced. Improperly managed, the transition to a world dominated by social media and AI could prove spiritually ruinous—as we surrender not just moral reasoning but also creativity, expression, and genuine human connection to machines that cannot understand what they are taking from us.
The surrender is already happening in slow, devastating ways, the full impact of which is just coming into view. In May 2022, I visited Amity High School in Woodbridge, Connecticut, to talk about the social media regulation bill I had just introduced with three other senators—Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Katie Britt of Alabama, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas—all parents of school-age kids.
I was convinced the students would object most loudly to provisions of the bill that required age verification or parental consent. But I was wrong. These students were focused on a different provision—the ban on the use of the personalized content algorithm for users under eighteen. Almost the entire conversation was devoted to their deep worry over losing access to the algorithms on Instagram and TikTok that provided them with a constant conveyor belt of content. Most of these kids had become dependent on an algorithm feeding them customized information. They simply could not imagine a world in which they had to engage in real-life trial and error to discover new passions.
The generation raised on social media algorithms is missing out on a key rite of passage for adolescents—the ritual of discovery. There is work that goes into searching the world for things to care about. There is wonder in the chaotic hunt for passions and subcultures that make life worthwhile: your neighbor’s older sister who introduces you to classic rock, the tucked-away comic book shop where you discover graphic novels, the afternoon you wander into the local park and join a game of pickup football for the first time and decide you want to get good at it. The algorithm is certainly more efficient than the old trial and error of discovery, but kids get less practice in failure, negotiating real-world spaces, and teamwork.
These students at Amity High didn’t know what they were missing—all they knew was the reality that the social media system was delivering to them. As I left the school, a teacher quietly followed me out and whispered, “These kids don’t realize how addicted they are. It’s scary.”
This “system” has been constructed by technology industry elites consumed by profit obsession and greed, willing to inflict incalculable spiritual damage on our nation in order to become billionaires and, soon, trillionaires. These leaders long ago surrendered their own moral judgment, not to machines, but to the cult of technology—to an evangelical-like belief that all innovation is inherently good, that what can be built should be built, and that the all-knowing market will sort out any kinks or collateral damage. “Move fast and break things,” Facebook famously instructed its employees. But the cult-of-technology crowd never stopped to ask what, exactly, they were breaking; at what cost; and whether what they broke could ever be repaired.
The book comes out May 26 and you can pre-order it HERE.
Tour Schedule:
NEW YORK CITY: Tuesday, May 26 - 6:30pm ET
McNally Jackson at Judson Memorial Church
In conversation with Katie Couric
https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/senator-chris-murphy-katie-couric
WASHINGTON, DC: Wednesday, May 27 - 7pm ET
Sixth & I with Politics and Prose
In conversation with Jonathan Capehart
https://www.sixthandi.org/event/senator-chris-murphy/
CHICAGO: Thursday, May 28 - 7pm CT
WBEZ and Exile in Bookville at the Studebaker Theater
In conversation with Zeenat Rahman
https://www.fineartsbuilding.com/events/an-evening-with-senator-chris-murphy/
ST. LOUIS: Friday, May 29 - 7pm CT
St. Louis County Library with Left Bank Books
In conversation with Sarah Fenske
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/author-event-senator-chris-murphy-crisis-of-the-common-good-tickets-1986459544973?aff=oddtdtcreator
CAMBRIDGE, MA: Saturday, May 30 - 7pm ET
Harvard Bookstore at First Parish Church
In conversation with Heather Cox Richardson
https://www.harvard.com/event/chris-murphy
NEW HAVEN: Sunday, May 31 - 2pm ET
RJ Julia at Omni New Haven
In conversation with Emily Bazelon
https://rjjulia.com/event/2026-05-31/senator-chris-murphy-crisis-common-good
LOS ANGELES: Saturday, June 6 - 4pm PT
Writers Bloc and Book Soup at Moss Theater at New Roads
In conversation with Elex Michaelson
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/writers-bloc-presents-us-senator-chris-murphy-tickets-1985887343503
CORTE MADERA: Sunday, June 7 - 4pm PT
Book Passage
In conversation with Steve Kerr
https://www.bookpassage.com/event/us-senator-chris-murphy-crisis-common-good
SEATTLE: Friday, June 19 - 7:30pm PT
Town Hall Seattle with Elliott Bay Book Company
In conversation with Marcus Harrison Green
https://townhallseattle.org/event/senator-chris-murphy/
CHARLESTON: Friday, July 24 - 6pm ET
Buxton Books at Circular Congregational Church
https://charleston.boldtypetickets.com/events/183820953/crisis-of-the-common-good-an-author-event-with-u-s-senator-chris-murphy
ATLANTA: Saturday, July 25 - 7pm ET
A Cappella Books at Wild Heaven West End Garden Club
https://www.freshtix.com/events/murphycommon
What Hannah Arendt Actually Observed in Eichmann — and What She Thought It Meant
Modern references to Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” are often detached from what she actually wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem and from the specific intellectual problem she believed she was confronting at the Adolf Eichmann Trial.
The popular retelling usually goes something like this: Arendt expected a monstrous, demonic architect of genocide and instead encountered an ordinary bureaucrat. But this framing imposes a dramatic psychological revelation onto Arendt that is not really supported by the record.
Arendt did not conclude that Eichmann was “just a clerk,” nor did she deny his role in the machinery of extermination. She knew perfectly well that he had organized deportations that led directly to mass murder. Her concern was different and, in some ways, more philosophically disturbing.
What struck Arendt was not Eichmann’s innocence or ordinariness, but his peculiar shallowness.
Again and again in her reporting, she emphasized his inability to speak outside of stock phrases, clichés, bureaucratic formulas, and rehearsed abstractions. Eichmann constantly relied on official language and administrative euphemism. He seemed incapable of reflective moral speech. He did not present himself as a tragic fanatic wrestling with conscience, nor as a grand ideological theorist. Instead, he appeared to Arendt as someone who had surrendered genuine thinking to formulaic systems of language and obedience.
This observation became the foundation of what she later called “the banality of evil.”
The word “banality” has caused endless confusion because many readers interpret it to mean that evil itself is trivial, common, harmless, or mediocre. That was not Arendt’s argument. The evil of the Nazi regime was not banal in scale or consequence. Rather, Arendt believed the perpetrators could participate in extraordinary crimes without possessing extraordinary psychological depth.
The horror, in her interpretation, was precisely the mismatch between the magnitude of the crimes and the superficiality of the perpetrator’s moral reasoning.
For Arendt, Eichmann did not appear as a Shakespearean villain animated by deep hatred or sadistic genius. He appeared as a man who had ceased to engage in what she considered authentic thinking — the internal dialogue through which a person examines actions, judges right from wrong, and imagines the standpoint of others.
This is why later simplifications of Arendt into slogans such as “evil is ordinary” are misleading. Her argument was not sociological in the broad sense. She was not primarily claiming that bureaucracy automatically creates evil or that modern systems erase moral agency. In fact, Arendt resisted explanations that dissolved individual responsibility into impersonal historical or technological forces.
She insisted that Eichmann remained morally responsible.
Indeed, one of the deepest tensions in Arendt’s account is that she simultaneously viewed Eichmann as intellectually shallow and fully culpable. His reliance on bureaucratic language did not excuse him. If anything, it demonstrated how the abandonment of reflective judgment could coexist with active participation in atrocity.
Arendt also did not portray Eichmann as politically neutral or wholly non-ideological. This is another common distortion. She understood that he operated within Nazi ideology and that he accepted the legitimacy of the regime. However, later historical evidence — especially material from the Sassen interviews — revealed Eichmann to be more explicitly antisemitic and ideologically committed than Arendt publicly emphasized at the time.
Critics therefore had grounds to argue that she underestimated the depth of Eichmann’s ideological convictions.
But even this criticism does not invalidate her central insight. Arendt’s enduring concern was not whether Eichmann hated Jews intensely enough. It was whether modern individuals could commit catastrophic acts while insulating themselves from moral reflection through language, procedure, careerism, and obedience.
In this sense, Arendt’s work was ultimately about thinking itself.
For her, genuine thinking was not identical with intelligence, education, or technical competence. A highly functional administrator could still fail at thinking in the moral sense she considered essential to political life. Eichmann’s danger, as she interpreted him, lay partly in his inability — or refusal — to step outside official categories and examine what he was actually doing.
This is why many modern invocations of Arendt become misleading when they transform her argument into a broad theory that “systems,” “technology,” or “algorithms” eliminate responsibility. Arendt was suspicious of all frameworks that dissolved individual judgment into historical inevitability or impersonal structures.
Her emphasis remained fixed on the individual capacity — and obligation — to think and judge even while operating inside institutions.
The central shock of Eichmann, for Arendt, was therefore not that evil looked ordinary. It was that catastrophic evil could coexist with moral thoughtlessness, administrative normality, and the collapse of reflective judgment.
You and the teacher are right. We face major risk if youing people are conditioned to passively receive info as default means of learning. The trend reduces individual and group cognitive sovereignty, making people more manipulable. We do need more grassroots civic groups focused on getting kids out in nature, observing, playing, learning. It's getting harder to do with the dopamine buzz they're cotinuously getting through their device screens, = we need creative ways for the real world option to be more appealing.