roachboy

the people who administered the holocaust---you know, worked in the bureaucracy that implemented it, that set things up and put them into motion--operated what is sometimes called a bounded rationality. everyone does, but this is just an extreme example.
one feature of bounded rationalities is compartmentalization. one type of compartmentalization is the separation of a bureaucratically and/or politically sanctioned goals from their consequences.
so exterminating a population could come to be seen as a neutral administrative objective.
people inside that bureaucracy did their duty...they were bound by whatever they understood the professional code of ethics to be, say, as well as by social solidarities that dovetailed with and were reinforced by political or ideological consensus. they operated in social, political and professional contexts that normalized a day gig which was--if you thought about it this way---organizing the extermination of another group of human beings because of their religion and/or ethnicity.

within those contexts, participating in genocide was a rational action.
how useful is the category?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite