Pluralism is the best safeguard against ordinary people committing immoral acts under authority

Evidence

A most remarkable conclusion flowing from the full set of Milgram experiments is that pluralism is the best preventive medicine against morally normal people engaging in morally abnormal actions. The Nazis must first have destroyed the vestiges of political pluralism to set off on projects like the Holocaust, in which the expected readiness of ordinary people for immoral and inhuman actions had to be calculated among the necessary – and available – resources. In the USSR the systematic destruction of the real and putative adversaries of the system took off in earnest only after the residues of social autonomy, and hence of the political pluralism which reflected it, had been extirpated. Unless pluralism had been eliminated on the global-societal scale, organizations with criminal purposes, which need to secure an unflagging obedience of their members in the perpetration of evidently immoral acts, are burdened with the task of erecting tight artificial barriers isolating the members from the ‘softening’ influence of diversity of standards and opinions. The voice of individual moral conscience is best heard in the tumult of political and social discord — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 469

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that pluralism is ‘the best preventive medicine’ and that the voice of conscience is ‘best heard in the tumult of political and social discord’ is a dense normative-analytic insight about the preconditions of mass atrocity.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s pluralism-of-the-public-realm and to the Islamophobia field’s concern with how monocultures of authority enable exclusion. — connects to: Humility and self-awareness can prevent societal oppression. — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos, 601; Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 476; Ordinary people can commit extreme brutality under the right circumstances — Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of a Boy…, 1 (+1 more)

Related

• Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production (similarity 0.80)
• Rational self-interest alone suffices for evil to operate unchallenged. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production #qualifies (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 476
• Ordinary people can commit extreme brutality under the right circumstances #expands (0.80) — Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of a Boy…, 1
• Humility and self-awareness can prevent societal oppression. #expands (0.75) — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos, 601
• The discourse of right masks domination as legitimate sovereignty and obligation. #complicates (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 44