Preventing mass atrocities depends on societal institutions, not on producing heroic resisters

Evidence

Returning to the point about heroic individuals, in truth there are probably individuals who have the strength to “stand against” the forces that the present authors and I are conceptualizing. But my task in this essay is to elucidate the strengths of the forces that surround individuals caught up in these organizations, the forces that lead individuals along the continuum of destruction. I agree that there are some individuals who can stand against these pressures, but I do not accept the implication that is sometimes drawn from that—that the “real task” in resisting these atrocities is to produce more such heroes or martyrs. I see the central task of preventing these atrocities as existing at a different level, at the level of societal institutions. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4044

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s banality of evil and the Milgram/Stanford prison work on situational pressure vs. dispositional heroism. — connects to: Institutional human rights strength does not measure human welfare — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 444