Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime

Evidence

By and large, all rulers can count on rationality being on their side. But the Nazi rulers, additionally, twisted the stakes of the game so that the rationality of survival would render all other motives of human action irrational. Inside the Nazi-made world, reason was the enemy of morality. Logic required consent to crime. Rational defence of one’s survival called for non-resistance to the other’s destruction. This rationality pitched the sufferers against each other and obliterated their joint humanity. It also made them into a threat and an enemy of all the others, not yet marked for death, and granted for the time being the role of bystanders. Graciously, the noble creed of rationality absolved both the victims and the bystanders from the charge of immorality and from guilty conscience. Having reduced human life to the calculus of self-preservation, this rationality robbed human life of humanity. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 583

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The most compressed statement of the book’s core thesis: instrumental rationality as the mechanism that severed morality from action and produced mass complicity.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘evil of rationality’ concept that the whole chapter builds toward.
• XREF: connects to: Nazi law claimed retroactive global jurisdiction over all peoples — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 932; Nazi law reversed the presumption of rights to presume universal rightlessness at birth.; Older Nazi officials retained moral qualms the genocidal machine overrode (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• The Nazi accomplishment was neutralizing universal moral inhibition against killing #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 520
• Nazi control worked by making rational self-interest equal cooperation. #corroborates (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 382
• Nazi power operated by crafting a rational make-believe world for victims #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 580
• Totalitarian rule replaces external coercion with domination from within each person #expands (0.80)
• Modern rational society enabled systematic genocide and discredited impulsive mass violence #corroborates (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 261
• Moral judgment survived the Holocaust only outside all existing rules #qualifies (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 496