Mass murder is accomplished mostly by indifferent functionaries, not sadists

Evidence

The point to remember is that for every villain of Goldhagen’s book, for every German and non-German who killed his victims with pleasure and enthusiasm, there were dozens and hundreds of Germans and non-Germans who contributed to the mass murder no less effectively without feeling either way about their victims and about the nature of the actions involved. And the point is that, while we know quite well that prejudice threatens humanity, and we even know a little about how to fight and constrain the ill-intentions of the people tainted with prejudice, we know next to nothing about how to stave off the threat of a murder which masquerades as a routine and unemotional function of orderly society. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 693

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the biopolitics/necropolitics and banality-of-evil lineage this reader is assembling for the Islamophobia module — Arendt’s ‘floating responsibility’ and administrative evil recur in modern exclusion mechanisms. — connects to: Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 691; Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 262; Individual sadism is functionally inferior to disciplined bureaucracy for mass killing — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 91 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion that a murder masquerading as routine bureaucratic function is more dangerous and less understood than open prejudice is a paradigm-shifting framework, not just a passing point.

Related

• Individual sadism is functionally inferior to disciplined bureaucracy for mass killing (similarity 0.88)
• Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity (similarity 0.84)
• Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. (similarity 0.83)
• Bureaucratic killing efficiency requires emotional neutrality, not enthusiasm (similarity 0.83)
• Mass murder required neutralizing proximity-based moral drives. (similarity 0.82)
• Bureaucratic means-ends inversion sustained mass murder beyond its original purpose (similarity 0.82)
• Eichmann’s mass-murder participation was careerist, not hate-driven. (similarity 0.81)
• Modern genocide thrives on bureaucratic indifference, not on active hatred (similarity 0.81)
• Bureaucratic-technical framing enabled depersonalized mass murder at unprecedented scale. (similarity 0.80)
• The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (similarity 0.80)
• Most genocide is committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic roles, not psychopaths. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Individual sadism is functionally inferior to disciplined bureaucracy for mass killing #corroborates (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 91
• Bureaucratic killing efficiency requires emotional neutrality, not enthusiasm #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 698
• Mass murder required neutralizing proximity-based moral drives. #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 528
• Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 262
• Organized ordinary masses out-crime professional criminals under totalitarian rule #expands (0.77)