Exploiting victim rationality was cheaper than controlling them through fear

Evidence

Members of the Sonderkommando knew that to tell the bathers that the bathroom was a gas chamber was an offence punishable by instant death. The crime would not seem so abominable, and the punishment would not be so harsh, had the victims been led to their death simply by fear or suicidal resignation. But to found their order on fear alone, the SS would have needed more troops, arms and money. Rationality was more effective, easier to obtain, and cheaper. And thus to destroy them, the SS men carefully cultivated the rationality of their victims. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 581

Categorization

• XREF: Bears directly on the economic logic of bureaucratic extermination argued elsewhere in the book — cost-effectiveness as the driver of murderous methods. — connects to: Victim cooperation was itself a rational strategy, not a lapse of judgment — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 398; Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349; Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 95 (+3 more)

Related

• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction (similarity 0.87)
• Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction (similarity 0.87)
• Even the condemned were left a rational choice among death options (similarity 0.86)
• The Holocaust succeeded partly through victims’ rational actions. (similarity 0.85)
• Nazi power operated by crafting a rational make-believe world for victims (similarity 0.84)
• Victim cooperation was itself a rational strategy, not a lapse of judgment (similarity 0.83)
• Rational calculations during the Nazi era carried hidden psychological costs (similarity 0.81)
• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime (similarity 0.81)
• Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. (similarity 0.80)
• Forcing survival to require soiled hands manufactures accomplices over time (similarity 0.80)
• Rationality of the actor and of the action can diverge, making reason self-destructive. (similarity 0.80)
• The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends. (similarity 0.79)
• Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Victim cooperation was itself a rational strategy, not a lapse of judgment #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 398
• Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 95
• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction #qualifies (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349
• Certainty, not severity, makes punishment deter because it fixes crime-punishment links in minds #qualifies (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 157