Civilized order makes happiness a travesty whether it sanctions or forbids it.

Evidence

Let us remember that the only case in which traditionally, following Le Bon, we used to admit this (that is, the perpetration of indecent things by otherwise decent people) to be possible, was a situation in which normal, civilized, rational patterns of human interaction have been broken; a crowd, brought together by hatred or panic; a casual encounter of strangers, each pulled out of his ordinary context and suspended for a time in a social void; a tightly packed town square, where shouts of panic replace command and stampede instead of authority decides the direction. We used to believe that the unthinkable may only happen when people stop thinking: when the lid of rationality is taken off the cauldron of pre-social and uncivilized human passions. Milgram’s findings also turn upside-down that much older image of the world, according to which humanity was fully on the side of the rational order, while inhumanity was fully confined to its occasional breakdowns. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 435 (#expands, via linked claim)

Modernity is an inherently transgressive mode of being-in-the-vvorld. Visions of order are born out of disaffection with the existing state of affairs; while attempts to make such visions into flesh give birth to new disaffections and new, revised, and so deemed to be improved, visions. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 431 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 435; Modern visions of order generate the very disaffection they aim to cure — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 431

Broader Connections

• Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 435
• Modern visions of order generate the very disaffection they aim to cure #corroborates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 431