Durable moral rationalizations persist long after the killings end

Evidence

This explanation is good as far as it goes, but to my mind doesn’t go far enough. As described earlier, many people participated in the direct acts of killing, and many others knew where the boxcars were going. More needs to be said about the mental alterations that took place in those individuals; Weber’s “routinization of bureaucratic subroutines” is not enough. They normally have been permanently morally altered in ways that change their thinking and behavior. The continuing mark of their past experiences with the killing machine is mental, and consists of the structures of moral thought that they were led to use to rationalize their actions in the first place. Unless they have had some sort of moral epiphany, they continue to believe what the killing machine taught them: “regrettable necessities,” “for the good of the state,” “the alien communist ideology threatened the Argentine way of life.” (This was the point of the banal conversations that Arendt had with Eichmann, in which he went on and on about “necessities of state.” These statements reflected the moral rationalizations that he had formed to justify his conduct.) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3964

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running thread on self-justification and cognitive dissonance research; also echoes Eichmann-in-Jerusalem discussions elsewhere in the volume. — connects to: State injustice becomes manageable by delaying accountability until wrongdoers die — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1755
• DEEPTHINKING: Distinguishes two mechanisms of mass killing — bureaucratic routinization vs. permanent moral alteration — and insists the second runs deeper; a distinction worth sitting with when thinking about institutional evil.