A Brief History of Inhumanity
Humanity possesses a remarkable talent. It manages, with astonishing reliability, to create its worst disasters in the name of its finest intentions.
Hardly anyone wakes up in the morning, looks into the mirror, and thinks:
„Today I shall do evil.“
People usually consider themselves the good ones. They fight for progress, security, justice, freedom, order, and a better future. And if a few people happen to get crushed along the way—well, the road of history has to be paved with something.
The cemeteries of the world are full of people who died for great ideas.
The ideas themselves are often in excellent health.
Some were even honored afterwards.
Literature has long been familiar with this temptation. In Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, we encounter a scientist: the Doctor. He researches, gathers knowledge, and expands the boundaries of human understanding. A noble undertaking.
Unfortunately, he requires a human being for the experiment.
Woyzeck.
The poor soldier becomes a test subject with a pulse.
Not out of hatred.
Not out of cruelty.
But out of scientific curiosity.
That is what makes it so disturbing.
The Doctor does not need to hate Woyzeck. He merely needs to stop seeing him as a human being.
After all, test tubes do not suffer.
Anthony Burgess pushes this idea further in A Clockwork Orange. Alex is a violent criminal, a sadist, a delinquent. In short, not a particularly sympathetic character.
The state therefore develops an elegant solution.
It takes away his freedom.
Not entirely.
Only the part that causes trouble.
His ability to choose wrongly.
The result is impressive.
No more violence.
No more danger.
No more responsibility.
No more freedom.
The statistics celebrate.
The government celebrates.
The human being remains silent.
He has been successfully repaired.
Like a toaster.
In Black Box, the process becomes more sophisticated. The modern world generally prefers subtler methods than open violence. People are not forced.
They are persuaded.
Their chains are marketed as progress.
The participants want to become more successful. More efficient. More productive. Happier.
They enter the experiment voluntarily.
How reassuring.
When people surrender their freedom themselves, it saves an enormous amount of police work.
And later nobody can accuse you of having forced them.
In Ernst Toller’s Masses and Man, we encounter another kind of world-improver: the revolutionary.
Their goals are noble.
Justice.
Liberation.
A better society.
Who could object to that?
The problem does not begin with the goal.
It begins with the method.
Suddenly words appear such as necessity, historical responsibility, sacrifice, and inevitability.
Remarkable words.
They appear with striking reliability whenever people begin explaining why others must suffer.
The nameless woman realizes something that political movements of every persuasion prefer not to hear:
A just future does not become more just simply because enough people are sacrificed on the way there.
Perhaps inhumanity begins precisely at this point.
Not with hatred.
But with indifference.
Or, to continue Hannah Arendt’s line of thought, perhaps it begins where people cease to be people.
Where they become cases.
Numbers.
Files.
Experimental subjects.
Historical necessities.
Arendt described the „banality of evil“ not as demonic wickedness but as something far more unsettling: thoughtlessness.
People stop judging.
They function.
They execute.
They administer.
They optimize.
They organize.
And eventually a train departs on time.
Somewhere a form is filled out correctly.
Somewhere a statistic improves.
Somewhere an experiment is completed successfully.
And somewhere a human being disappears.
The procedure has been properly processed.
The file may now be closed.
Perhaps that is the real warning.
The Doctor in Woyzeck does not need to hate Woyzeck.
The therapists in A Clockwork Orange do not need to hate Alex.
The operators of the Black Box do not need to hate their participants.
The revolutionaries in Masses and Man do not need to hate their opponents.
It is enough that they stop perceiving them as human beings.
Hatred, at least, still recognizes its target as human.
Indifference does not even grant that much.
It sees cases.
Files.
Problems.
Metrics.
Material.
And material possesses one invaluable advantage:
It does not argue back.
Bertolt Brecht captured the tragedy of an entire generation in just a few lines:
„Ah, we
Who wished to prepare the ground for kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.“
These lines are so powerful because they are not an accusation.
They are a confession.
Not „them.“
Not „those people.“
Not „the others.“
But „we.“
Perhaps this is the rarest form of political honesty:
the recognition that one can fight for good and still cause harm;
that one can demand freedom and become authoritarian;
that one can preach justice while forgetting human beings;
that one can seek to save the world while driving over the people who actually live in it.
And then, of all things, a punk band comes along and expresses the entire debate more clearly than some philosophers manage in five hundred pages.
Toxoplasma asks:
„Hey, little world-improver…“
Behind the mockery lies a devastating question:
What exactly are you doing to people while you are busy saving the world?
Not after the victory.
Not after the revolution.
Not after the scientific breakthrough.
Not after the great social transformation.
But now.
Today.
Here.
Because that is precisely where the difference between humanism and fanaticism becomes visible.
Humanists love people and hope for a better world.
Fanatics love their better world and hope that people will somehow fit into it.
Perhaps true humanity does not consist in improving the world.
Perhaps it consists in asking, at every step, what is happening to human beings while we are trying to improve it.
History knows a frightening number of movements that claimed to save humanity.
Most began by educating people.
Quite a few by patronizing them.
Some by eliminating them.
And almost all were convinced they stood on the right side of history.
That is precisely where that form of inhumanity begins which mistakes itself for humanity.
It rarely marches with a drawn knife.
More often, it carries a plan.
And proceeds to implement it properly.
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