Extreme evil can stem from meticulous order rather than its breakdown

Evidence

The Holocaust had dwarfed all remembered and inherited images of evil. With that, it inverted all established explanations of evil deeds. It suddenly transpired that the most horrifying evil in human memory did not result from the dissipation of order, but from an impeccable, faultless and unchallengeable rule of order. It was not the work of an obstreperous and uncontrollable mob, but of men in uniforms, obedient and disciplined, following the rules and meticulous about the spirit and the letter of their briefing. It became known very soon that these men, whenever they took their unforms off, were in no way evil. They behaved much like all of us. They had wives they loved, children they cosseted, friends they helped and comforted in case of distress. It seemed unbelievable that once in uniform the same people shot, gassed or presided over the shooting and gassing of thousands of other people, including women who were someone’s beloved wives and babies who were someone’s cosseted children. It also was terrifying. How could ordinary people like you and me do it? Surely in some way, let it be a small way, a tiny way, they must have been special, different, unlike us? Surely they must have escaped the ennobling, humanizing impact of our enlightened, civilized society? Or, alternatively, they must have been spoiled, corrupted, subjected to some vicious or unhappy combination of educational factors which resulted in a faulty, diseased personality? — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 430

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ and the whole tradition this chapter feeds; also directly anticipates the reader’s Islamophobia toolkit where bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion. — connects to: Absolute evil reveals evil’s radical essence by exceeding comprehensible motives; Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 435; Confused hierarchies make totalitarian rule shock-proof and command-certain — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 922 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Core inversion at the heart of Bauman’s thesis: modernity’s ordered rationality as the enabling condition of genocide, not a regression from it.

Related

• Persecution is inseparable from the system of order itself, whose essence is force (similarity 0.85)
• Absolute evil reveals evil’s radical essence by exceeding comprehensible motives (similarity 0.85)
• Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it (similarity 0.83)
• Holocaust perpetrators were normal and their institutions socially non-pathological (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.81)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.79)
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence (similarity 0.79)
• Rational self-interest alone suffices for evil to operate unchallenged. (similarity 0.79)
• Genocide is a normal potential of modernity, not its malfunction. (similarity 0.79)
• Absolute evil exceeds the categories of punishable and forgivable crime (similarity 0.79)
• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime (similarity 0.78)
• Civilized order makes happiness a travesty whether it sanctions or forbids it. (similarity 0.78)
• Bureaucratic means-ends inversion sustained mass murder beyond its original purpose (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 435
• Confused hierarchies make totalitarian rule shock-proof and command-certain #expands (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 922