Rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers

Evidence

But then it was not a strategy of the victims in the first place. It was an addendum, an extension, of the strategy of destruction, worked out and administered by forces bent on annihilation. Those who embraced the ‘save what you can’ strategy had been first marked as the victims. Those who had marked them as victims created a situation in which things needed to be saved in order to exist, and thus the calculation of ‘loss avoidance’, ‘costs of survival’, ‘lesser evil’, was set in operation. In such a situation the rationality of the victims had become the weapon of their murderers. But then the rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 399

Categorization

• XREF: The aphoristic closing is a generalizable mechanism of domination that carries straight into how state rationality co-opts subjects’ self-interest in exclusionary systems. — connects to: Rationality itself can be weaponized against the rational agent — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 366; Under asymmetric power, the rationality of the ruled serves the rulers’ aims. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 424
• SHARE: The closing line — ‘the rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers’ — is a sharp, quotable provocation for anyone working on theories of domination.

Related

• Under asymmetric power, the rationality of the ruled serves the rulers’ aims. (similarity 0.83)
• Rationality itself can be weaponized against the rational agent (similarity 0.82)
• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Under asymmetric power, the rationality of the ruled serves the rulers’ aims. #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 424
• Rationality itself can be weaponized against the rational agent #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 366