Total social mapping enables obliterating people without any trace

Evidence

Responsibility, this building block of all moral behaviour, arises out of the proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility, and responsibility is proximity. Discussion of the relative priority of one or the other is admittedly gratuitous, as none is conceivable alone. Defusion of responsibility, and thus the neutralization of the moral urge which follows it, must necessarily involve (is, in fact, synonymous with) replacing proximity with a physical or spiritual separation. The alternative to proximity is social distance. The moral attribute of proximity is responsibility; the moral attribute of social distance is lack of moral relationship, or heterophobia. Responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded; it may eventually be replaced with resentment once the fellow human subject is transformed into an Other. The process of transformation is one of social separation. It was such a separation which made it possible for thousands to kill, and for millions to watch the murder without protesting. It was the technological and bureaucratic achievement of modern rational society which made such a separation possible. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 517 (#expands, via linked claim)

As Milgram’s experiments dramatically demonstrated, the silencing of the moral urge and the suspension of moral inhibitions is achieved precisely through making the genuine (though often unknown to the actor) targets of action ‘remote and barely visible’, rather than through an overt anti-moral crusade, or an indoctrination aimed at substituting an alternative set of rules for the old moral system. The most obvious example of the technique which places the victims out of sight, and hence renders them inaccessible to moral assessment, are modern weapons. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550 (#expands, via linked claim)

The distance we feel from our actions is proportionate to our ignorance of them; our ignorance, in turn, is largely a measure of the length of the chain of intermediaries between ourselves and our acts … As consciousness of the context drops out, the actions become motions without consequence. With the consequences out of view, people can be parties to the most abhorrent acts without ever raising the question of their own role and responsibility … — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 552 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Totalitarian police aim to map all social relations of the entire population; Long intermediary chains let people commit abhorrent acts without role awareness — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 552; Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550 (+4 more)

Related

• Morality dies when social distance replaces proximity, enabling mass murder (similarity 0.87)
• Mass murder required neutralizing proximity-based moral drives. (similarity 0.84)
• Long intermediary chains let people commit abhorrent acts without role awareness (similarity 0.83)
• Face-to-face animosity rarely extends into mass murder. (similarity 0.79)
• Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity (similarity 0.79)
• Bureaucratic-technical framing enabled depersonalized mass murder at unprecedented scale. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Morality dies when social distance replaces proximity, enabling mass murder #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 517
• Long intermediary chains let people commit abhorrent acts without role awareness #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 552
• Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550
• Empathy discourse is repurposed to legitimize mechanized killing #expands (0.75)
• Automated targeting thresholds centralize atrocity into a single parameter-setting decision. #expands (0.75)
• Invisible compartmentalization, not invisibility itself, makes crimes permissible #contradicts (0.72)