There are those who enjoy spectacles of cruelty. “We” are not all “decent people” who will absorb the correct moral lesson. Sadism is a perpetual subterranean force that the politics of hate can unleash.

This was shown most devastatingly in the cruelty exhibited by many Germans and their allies during the Holocaust. After the war, [political theorist Hannah] Arendt and [social psychologist Stanley] Milgram inadvertently encouraged a mischaracterization of the Nazis’ motives. Much of the killing of Jews was not done in an orderly fashion at concentration camps (which in any case constituted, as Abram de Swaan put it in his 2015 book “The Killing Compartments,” scenes of “obscene savagery and gory barbarity”) but rather at killing sites where local conscripts engaged in a wild collective frenzy, with victims being humiliated and tortured before they were killed.

But what Milgram and his generation did was to create the illusion that science could comprehend human behavior and therefore control it. Irrational delight in cruelty was written out of the story.

from Shaw, T. (2021, August 17). The Morally Troubling “Dirty Work” We Pay Others to Do in Our Place. The New York Times. https://outline.com/bnMt3c