Ordinary co-ordinated philistines proved better raw material for mass atrocity than professional criminals.

Evidence

It turned out that they were both mistaken. The mob, the underworld of the bourgeois class, hoped that the helpless masses would help them into power, would support them when they attempted to forward their private interests, that they would be able simply to replace the older strata of bourgeois society and to instill into it the more enterprising spirit of the underworld. Yet totalitarianism in power learned quickly that enterprising spirit was not restricted to the mob strata of the population and that, in any event, such initiative could only be a threat to the total domination of man. Absence of scruple, on the other hand, was not restricted to the mob either and, in any event, could be taught in a relatively short time. For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of co-ordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 801

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s later banality-of-evil argument and to Milgram’s obedience studies; also cross-references the ‘job holder and good family man’ dynamic that contemporary genocide studies (Browning’s Ordinary Men) build on.