Bureaucratic killing efficiency requires emotional neutrality, not enthusiasm

Evidence

Thirdly, no member of the deathwatch team performs his job for the love of killing, or even out of enthusiasm for the death penalty. Motives or their absence have nothing to do with what is going on. ‘Only a few members of the execution team support the death penalty outright and without reservation,’ Johnson observes. When filling the vacancies, prison governors did not advertise for sadists or ‘law and order’ addicts, militants and vigilantes. Strong feelings of whatever kind would, if anything, interfere with the smooth running of the bureaucratic procedure. It is safer, and above all much more efficient, to put emotions aside. Were emotions not defused, too much would depend on erratic and bureaucratically uncontrollable shifts of mood. It is so much more effective when everything is done ‘by the book’. In the bureaucratic organization of the killing industry, as in any other bureaucratic organization, personal sympathies and antipathies are better left in the cloakroom before clock-in time. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 698

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘cloakroom’ metaphor for bureaucratic emotional suppression parallels Weberian rational-legal authority that the reader is already collecting for the modernity module. — connects to: Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 691; Mass murder is accomplished mostly by indifferent functionaries, not sadists — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 693; Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 694 (+5 more)

Related

• Individual sadism is functionally inferior to disciplined bureaucracy for mass killing (similarity 0.88)
• Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. (similarity 0.86)
• Mass murder is accomplished mostly by indifferent functionaries, not sadists (similarity 0.83)
• Bureaucratic-technical framing enabled depersonalized mass murder at unprecedented scale. (similarity 0.81)
• The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (similarity 0.80)
• Bureaucratic means-ends inversion sustained mass murder beyond its original purpose (similarity 0.79)
• Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity (similarity 0.79)
• Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends (similarity 0.79)
• Bureaucratic desk work destroys people while hiding causal links from actors (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Individual sadism is functionally inferior to disciplined bureaucracy for mass killing #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 91
• Violence becomes purely technical and instrumental when bureaucratized #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 287
• Bureaucratic distance makes actors’ moral standards irrelevant to operation success #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 295
• Empathy discourse is repurposed to legitimize mechanized killing #expands (0.80)