Individual resistance is too weak to counter coercive organizational pressure

Evidence

I continue to believe in that message, but I find I cannot apply it with such conviction as I used to when I think about the cases discussed here. To resist the psychological forces characteristic of the organizations discussed herein, pressures which strike me as often highly coercive and reinforced by real physical threats, requires a rare degree of individual strength indeed. This plea for resistance at the individual level to the contrary, the real action in evil-prevention may lie elsewhere. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4036 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Given the embedded nature of racial processes in the contemporary environment, it is unsurprising that subordinate groups may invoke difference to mystify, to deny knowledge of themselves to the dominant groups, to confuse and neutralize those who attempt to control or “help” them, or to reduce them to research objects. They may use difference to stress their own separateness, and to authorize their own representations. They may seek to legitimize their own definitions of cultural difference, including those against others from within their own collectivity. … This can lead at times, as we shall see later, to a strange convergence in the language of the racist right and of black or ethnic nationalists, as both infuse the racial or ethnic category with essentialist, and supposedly naturally inherited, characteristics. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 115 (#complicates, via linked claim)

“No one must go hungry or thirsty; if anyone does, he’s for the concentration camp!” This joke from Hitler’s Germany might shine forth as a maxim from above all the portals of the culture industry. With sly naïveté, it presupposes the most recent characteristic of society: that it can easily find out who its supporters are. Everybody is guaranteed formal freedom. No one is officially responsible for what he thinks. Instead everyone is enclosed at an early age in a system of churches, clubs, professional associations, and other such concerns, which constitute the most sensitive instrument of social control. Anyone who wants to avoid ruin must see that he is not found wanting when weighed in the scales of this apparatus. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Bureaucratic resistance to change is outweighed by competitive survival pressures. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 219; Individual escape attempts and structural collapse are different orders of resistance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1096; Widespread individual exit strategies undermine collective mobilization and perpetuate subordinate status. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 2747 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Individual resistance cannot withstand coercive organizational evil, so prevention must be structural. #corroborates (0.98) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4036
• Subordinate groups strategically deploy difference to resist dominant control and revalue themselves #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 115
• Social control operates through voluntary organizations rather than formal coercion #complicates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115