Bureaucracies weaponize natural group solidarity into exclusion of designated objects

Evidence

The effect of physical and purely psychical distance is, therefore, farther enhanced by the collective nature of damaging action. One may guess that even if obvious gains in the economy and efficiency of action brought by its rational organization and management are left out of account, the sheer fact that the oppressor is a member of a group must be assigned a tremendous role in facilitating the committing of cruel acts. It may be that a considerable part of bureaucratically callous and insensitive efficiency could be ascribed to factors other than the rational design of division of labour or chain of command: to the skilful, and not necessarily deliberate or planned, deployment of natural group-formative tendency of co-operative action, a tendency always coupled with boundary-drawing and exclusion of outsiders. Through its authority over recruitment of its members and over designation of its objects, bureaucratic organization is able to control the outcome of such a tendency, and assure that it leads to an ever-more profound and unbridgeable chasm between the actors (i.e. members of the organization) and the objects of action. This makes so much easier the transformation of the actors into the persecutors, and the objects into the victims. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 446

Categorization

• XREF: The group-formative tendency with boundary-drawing and exclusion prefigures the mechanisms Islamophobia scholarship will apply to in-group/out-group construction of Muslims. — connects to: Bureaucratic centralism signals a ruling group hardening into a narrow clique — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 777; Universalistic norms lose force without status-group exclusionary sanctions behind them. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 271; Exclusion ceremonies psychologically reaffirm the included members’ belonging (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Bureaucratic centralism signals a ruling group hardening into a narrow clique #expands (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 777
• Universalistic norms lose force without status-group exclusionary sanctions behind them. #corroborates (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 271
• Exclusion ceremonies psychologically reaffirm the included members’ belonging #expands (0.75)