Administrative mass death requires a humanity already dead to itself.
Evidence
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people. Rilke’s prayer for ‘one’s own death’ is a piteous attempt to conceal the fact that nowadays people merely snuff out. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 255
Categorization
- APHORISMS: Compressed to an aphoristic core: indifference toward one’s own members is what makes administrative killing possible.
- XREF: connects to: Totalitarian mass murder expresses what the masses have already become rather than a death-wish. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 254; Death converts the for-itself into an in-itself that only others can interpret — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1259; Assimilation requires the thing eaten already to be disposed toward its own destruction. (+9 more)
Broader Connections
- Assimilation requires the thing eaten already to be disposed toward its own destruction.
#corroborates(0.85) - At death a life becomes an in-itself whose meaning only others sustain.
#expands(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 63 - Death converts the for-itself into an in-itself that only others can interpret
#expands(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1259 - Totalitarian consistency demands destruction of human dignity because dignity implies creative unpredictability
#expands(0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1031 - Totalitarian ideology requires perpetually new categories of victims to survive
#expands(0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1046 - Death is the final victory of the in-itself over the for-itself
#expands(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 496 - Modern states treat abstract humanity as sacred but subject actual persons to institutional violence
#complicates(0.75) - Society’s interchangeability of persons has domesticated death.
#contradicts(0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 255 - Mass death from atrocity differs morally from ordinary, unavoidable death
#qualifies(0.75) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 406 - Refusing to recognize others’ death erodes one’s own humanity
#corroborates(0.70)