Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it

Evidence

Let us remember that the only case in which traditionally, following Le Bon, we used to admit this (that is, the perpetration of indecent things by otherwise decent people) to be possible, was a situation in which normal, civilized, rational patterns of human interaction have been broken; a crowd, brought together by hatred or panic; a casual encounter of strangers, each pulled out of his ordinary context and suspended for a time in a social void; a tightly packed town square, where shouts of panic replace command and stampede instead of authority decides the direction. We used to believe that the unthinkable may only happen when people stop thinking: when the lid of rationality is taken off the cauldron of pre-social and uncivilized human passions. Milgram’s findings also turn upside-down that much older image of the world, according to which humanity was fully on the side of the rational order, while inhumanity was fully confined to its occasional breakdowns. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 435

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the Le Bon crowd-theory folk model; sets up the reader’s genealogy of race-thinking where ‘rational’ administration is the genocidal instrument. — connects to: Absolute evil reveals evil’s radical essence by exceeding comprehensible motives; Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 83; Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 262 (+10 more)

Related

• Rationalized social relationships increase the efficiency of producing inhumanity (similarity 0.88)
• Civilized order makes happiness a travesty whether it sanctions or forbids it. (similarity 0.88)
• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility (similarity 0.87)
• Persecution is inseparable from the system of order itself, whose essence is force (similarity 0.85)
• The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (similarity 0.84)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.83)
• Extreme evil can stem from meticulous order rather than its breakdown (similarity 0.83)
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality (similarity 0.81)
• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime (similarity 0.81)
• Modern rational society enabled systematic genocide and discredited impulsive mass violence (similarity 0.80)
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence (similarity 0.80)
• Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity (similarity 0.80)
• Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. (similarity 0.80)
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible (similarity 0.79)
• Engineered suffering can be presented as mercy, legitimizing escalation (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility #corroborates (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 441
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible #corroborates (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 566
• Ethical systems that despise happiness often unconsciously provide outlets for cruelty and power. #expands (0.72) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2347