The scale and momentum of bureaucratic machinery enables resignation to evil.

Evidence

First, the terrible machine would go on, whether or not the doctor participated in it. Auschwitz was, among other things, a vast complex of buildings and trains and medical wards and persons and schedules and procedures, an enterprise that would continue working regardless of the doctor’s degree of participation. Second, although apparently the doctor could have declined to participate, that choice led at a minimum, to the dangers of the Russian Front. Doctors were in the military and were assigned to Auschwitz; that there was a choice about their participation was not necessarily apparent to them. (Of course, it was apparent to some, because they chose not to participate, an act of considerable courage in the circumstances.) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3907

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the structural critiques of bureaucracy and the banality of evil in Arendt and Bauman; also structurally parallels Milgrom’s analysis of how institutions justify participation through scale. — connects to: Bureaucratic resistance to change is outweighed by competitive survival pressures. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 219; Stories exposing systemic corruption can inadvertently reinforce resignation to it — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1574
• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘On Sacrifice’ theme — institutional machinery making individual complicity feel weightless and predetermined.