Ordinary decent people commit atrocities when ideologies authorize the harm

Evidence

Voltaire put it well when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Over the centuries, much destructive conduct has been perpetrated by ordinary, decent people in the name of righteous ideologies, religious principles, sociopolitical doctrines, and nationalistic imperatives (Kramer, 1990; Rapoport & Alexander, 1982; Reich, 1990). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 347

Categorization

• XREF: The Voltaire line is architectural for the whole moral-disengagement framework the reader wants to tie to Cooper’s analysis. — connects to: Corporate rhetoric flips the slow poisoning of the poor into an act of terror — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 162
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 347