Bureaucratic ‘doing’ orientation enables genocide without personal hatred of victims.

Evidence

The technical aspects of life, and things qua tools' are fraught with libido. The emphasis is on doing things’, with far-reaching indifference towards the content of what is going to be done. The pattern is found in numerous business people and also, in increasing numbers, among members of the rising managerial and technological class who maintain, in the process of production, a function between the old type of ownership and the workers’ aristocracy. Many fascist-political anti-Semites in Germany showed this syndrome: Himmler may be symbolic of them. Their sober intelligence, together with their almost complete absence of any affections makes them perhaps the most merciless of all. Their organizational way of looking at things predisposes them to totalitarian solutions. Their goal is the construction of gas chambers rather than the pogrom. They do not even have to hate the Jews; they `cope’ with them by administrative measures without any personal contacts with the victims. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1809

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘doing things’ libidinal/technical personality syndrome that produces the most merciless fascist administrators.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that administrative-technical orientation, not hatred, produced the Holocaust — that perpetrators ‘cope’ with victims administratively without affect — is a paradigm-shifting reframe of genocide’s psychological foundations.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s banality of evil thesis and to Bauman’s later argument in Modernity and the Holocaust about bureaucratic administration of genocide. — connects to: Most genocide is committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic roles, not psychopaths. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 150; People without prejudice can still participate zealously in genocide; Genocide required replacing collective rage with bureaucratic obedience — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 260 (+4 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly illuminates the administrative, non-ritualized character of sacrifice in industrial modernity — the gas chamber as rationalized rather than ritual killing.

Broader Connections

• Most genocide is committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic roles, not psychopaths. #corroborates (0.95) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 150
• Genocide is mostly committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic contexts #corroborates (0.95) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 150
• People without prejudice can still participate zealously in genocide #corroborates (0.90)
• Modern bureaucracy already contains everything needed for genocide without structural revision. #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 302
• Genocide required replacing collective rage with bureaucratic obedience #qualifies (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 260
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality, not a rupture from it. #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 258