Fragmented roles in killing machines let participants avoid registering the deaths

Evidence

First, in ways that the sociologist Weber initially conceptualized, the processes of doing evil have become routinized or alternately the person doing evil has become “a bureaucrat.” Actions that initially were shocking have become routinized, habitual, and at the end of the day in the concentration camps, the executioner can go home and read his children bedtime stories. This, I think, best fits the case of the individual who has some fragmented role in producing the evil action. When death, like cars or chairs, is produced on assembly lines, each individual eventually concentrates on the micro-requirements of his or her part in the process; the eventual outcome is rarely thought of. A group of police in a city round up the Jews and take them to a stadium. Later an army contingent takes them to the boxcars. A railroad worker throws the switches that bring the train to one or another subdestination on the way to the concentration camp. The fact of the eventual deaths is so remote that no participant finds it salient. Each person doing a subtask does so in a routinized way; it is only the final assembly of those subtasks that is horrible, and no individual “sees” that final solution. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3963

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgram’s experiments and Arendt’s banality of evil, as well as the Stanford prison experiment narrative running through this book. — connects to: Extermination stage killing requires that killers see victims as less than fully human — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 8