Forcing survival to require soiled hands manufactures accomplices over time

Evidence

By facing them with choices in which the ‘fittest’, who survived, could only emerge from the test with soiled hands, the designers made sure that with the passage of time the ghetto population would turn more and more into a company of accomplices to murder, and with it moral insensitivity and callousness would grow – to the detriment, and possibly extinction, of all brakes that normally constrain the pressure of the naked instinct of self-preservation. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 406

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349; Survival under extremity can require moral transformation — Alexis Okeowo, A Moonless, Starless Sky, 15; Rationalized social relationships increase the efficiency of producing inhumanity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 436

Related

• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction (similarity 0.87)
• Exploiting victim rationality was cheaper than controlling them through fear (similarity 0.80)
• Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction (similarity 0.79)
• Engineered suffering can be presented as mercy, legitimizing escalation (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Rationalized social relationships increase the efficiency of producing inhumanity #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 436
• Survival under extremity can require moral transformation #expands (0.78) — Alexis Okeowo, A Moonless, Starless Sky, 15