Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction

Evidence

This astonishing effect of successfully extending the rules of bureaucratic conduct, complete with the delegitimation of alternative loyalties and moral motives in general to encompass the intended victims of bureaucracy, and thereby deploying their skills and labour in the implementation of the task of their destruction, was achieved (much as in the mundane activity of every other, sinister or benign, bureacracy) in a twofold way. First, the external setting of the ghetto life was so designed that all actions of its leaders and inhabitants could not but remain objectively ‘functional’ to German purposes. ‘Everything that was designed to maintain its [ghetto] viability was simultaneously promoting a German goal … Jewish efficiency in allocating space or in distributing rations was an extension of German effectiveness. Jewish rigour in taxation or labour utilization was a reinforcement of German stringency, even Jewish incorruptability could be a tool of German administration.’ Second, particular care was taken that at every stage of the road the victims should be put in a situation of choice, to which criteria or rational action apply, and in which the rational decision invariably agrees with the ‘managerial design’. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 95

Categorization

• DEFINE: Bauman’s mechanism of how bureaucracy co-opts victims: manipulating the external setting plus forcing rational choice. This is a core toolkit concept.
• XREF: This ‘situation of choice where rational decision equals managerial design’ is the scaffold for the coercive-consent dynamic later-read texts will examine in Islamophobic statecraft. — connects to: Totalitarian complicity is made total by implicating victims in the crimes — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1015; Modern totalitarian terror governs the obedient by striking objectively innocent victims; Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 337 (+12 more)

Related

• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction (similarity 0.88)
• Exploiting victim rationality was cheaper than controlling them through fear (similarity 0.87)
• Modern totalitarian terror governs the obedient by striking objectively innocent victims (similarity 0.86)
• The Holocaust succeeded partly through victims’ rational actions. (similarity 0.85)
• Victim cooperation made the Holocaust bureaucratically feasible and historically distinctive. (similarity 0.85)
• Specialized monopoly bureaucracy seals off victims and enlists their rational motives (similarity 0.84)
• Nazi power operated by crafting a rational make-believe world for victims (similarity 0.84)
• Victim cooperation was itself a rational strategy, not a lapse of judgment (similarity 0.82)
• Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. (similarity 0.82)
• The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends. (similarity 0.81)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.81)
• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility (similarity 0.80)
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349
• The Holocaust succeeded partly through victims’ rational actions. #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 386
• Victim cooperation was itself a rational strategy, not a lapse of judgment #qualifies (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 398
• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 441
• A seemingly innocent act can lead to devastating consequences. #exemplifies (0.70) — Lynch, Thomas, The undertaking-life studies from the…, 204