The Silence of the Ordinary. Understanding Why.

They were all legal once. People followed orders and made them happen. Why?

And why does it happen now?

To begin addressing why seemingly good or 'normal' people ignore mass murder and genocide worldwide, or blindly follow orders that make them happen (like point a gun at a child), we must first reflect on the words of Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor. In his seminal memoir, If This is a Man (1947), Levi writes:

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. The most dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

This insight gets to the heart of a troubling phenomenon: ordinary people, not the few malevolent leaders, are often complicit in atrocities by simply following orders or remaining passive.

This issue speaks to the core of the nature vs. nurture debate. Are people innately predisposed to evil, or are they molded by their environment?

Dispositionism suggests that human behavior is largely driven by internal characteristics. Yet, historical examples like the Holocaust and other genocides challenge this, highlighting how external forces—social, political, and cultural—can have an overwhelming influence on human actions. Even if we possess a stable disposition, as the theory of Homo Psychologicus suggests, the environment plays a critical role in shaping our actions. Eugenics, for example, a theory embraced by the Nazis, sought to manipulate biological factors to justify mass extermination. It serves as a reminder of the dangers inherent in biological determinism.

Genocides throughout history, from the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, to what is happening today, underscore that humans are not born with an innate immunity to committing evil.

Rather, as Hannah Arendt observed in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, evil often arises from a failure to think critically. She famously remarked that Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, was not an overt villain, but rather a thoughtless bureaucrat. His "sheer thoughtlessness," according to Arendt, was not stupidity but an inability to reflect on the moral implications of his actions. This absence of critical reflection is far more dangerous than outright malevolence.

A man is father himself. He has a family he loves, and children he would die to protect. Yet, he is killing some's daughter or son, without blinking an eye. He understands the debilitating pain of losing a child, of even the thought of never seeing your baby again, yet he is mindlessly shooting. Why?

Levi's and Arendt's observations help explain how even people who are loving parents, dutiful citizens, and seemingly moral individuals can become complicit in mass murder. It is not that they are innately evil but that they fail to question the systems and authority figures that perpetuate such violence. Levi further remarks,

"There is no Auschwitz without the world; there is no Auschwitz without us."

In this haunting statement, he implicates not just the perpetrators but the bystanders—the entire world—as complicit in these crimes.

Human indifference to mass murder, therefore, is not a simple matter of inherent cruelty, but of acquiescence (acceptance without protest), fear, and conformity.

The work of psychologist Stanley Milgram sheds light on this dynamic.

His famous experiment demonstrated how ordinary individuals, under the influence of authority, were willing to inflict severe pain on another person simply because they were ordered to do so.

Milgram’s study reveals how susceptible we are to surrendering moral responsibility when under the sway of authority, mirroring the behavior of countless people during genocidal regimes. This lack of critical thinking, coupled with an overreliance on obedience, has dire consequences, and should be discussed more.

Moreover, we cannot talk about this topic without diving into one of its core sad pillars: the concept of dehumanization, which plays a central role in facilitating atrocities. As Levi noted, the Nazis systematically reduced Jews to mere numbers, stripping them of their humanity. People become animals, they become monsters, they become the absolute enemy. They are not people, they don't have a heart and soul, their tears becoming meaningless and their laughter becomes inaudible.

Dehumanization is a psychological tool that enables individuals to view their victims as something even less than human, and it has been a recurring theme in genocides throughout history. It allows soldiers to shoot unarmed civilians, torturers to inflict unspeakable pain, and neighbors to turn on neighbors. How can you kill thousands if you think they are humans, just like you?

The 1914 Christmas Truce during World War I offers a powerful counterexample to this dehumanization: when soldiers from both sides met in no-man's land to share food, play football, and bury their dead, they recognized their shared humanity, and for a brief moment in history, refused to kill one another again.

Yet, even when people are not ordered to commit atrocities directly, passivity becomes another form of complicity.

The bystander effect, a well-documented psychological phenomenon, reveals that in situations of crisis, individuals often fail to act, assuming someone else will intervene.

This diffusion of responsibility, coupled with fear and self-preservation, can explain why people turn a blind eye to genocide and mass murder. But as Levi and Arendt both insist, this passivity implicates us all.

The concept of in-group and out-group dynamics further helps explain how societies can facilitate atrocities like genocide. Social psychologists have long understood that humans are wired to categorize others into 'us' and 'them'. We do it all the time. Our football team and 'them', for example. Plus, we view members of an out-group as being more similar to each other than they actually are, often stereotyping them as one homogeneous entity. Do you see how dangerous this can be, if put in the context of something like war? "They are all the same, they are all evil, they are all terrorists, they all hate us... etc". And this instinct can be exacerbated by nationalist propaganda, economic disparities, and political instability.

Social Identity Theory  (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) offers insights into how in-group and out-group dynamics contribute to genocidal violence. Perpetrators often dehumanize the out-group, making it easier to justify violence, which is facilitated by propaganda and power structures, similar to what was observed in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

In Asch’s conformity experiments, we see how easily people conform to the group, even when they know the group is wrong. This behavior underpins much of the rationale for why ordinary citizens support genocidal policies or fail to speak out against them.

The tragedy of human behavior lies not only in our capacity for cruelty but in our ability to rationalize indifference and evade accountability. When there is no clear system of accountability, people are more likely to act out of selfishness or simply follow orders. Lack of accountability allows genocide to flourish, as we saw in the Rwandan genocide, where the international community largely failed to intervene.

Today, as we reflect on the atrocities of the past, we must also confront those happening in the present. Palestine serves as a stark reminder that the forces of dehumanization, obedience, and passivity are still at play. As with past genocides, the world watches from their homes, from a little window called phone, which makes it all dystopian. People choose the battles they want to look at. Chose which articles to click, which news to scroll past and try to remove suffering that does not belong to their own hearts from their minds. They chose the suffering in the world they care to read about, to talk about, to fight for.

Political, economic, and nationalistic interests have easily overshadowed the moral imperative to act and to even care. Moreover, social and psychological factors like fear, propaganda, and collective reasoning can cause people to abandon their values and lose their sense of moral responsibility.

Here there is a little more theory that can help you have a more grounded picture:

Solomon Asch's experiments on conformity show how easily people trust the collective and play along, even in situations as simple as identifying the length of a line. This tendency to conform and follow the group contributes to many things we do, including atrocities and systematic destruction.

Realistic Conflict Theory  (Sherif, 1966) explains how competition for resources, such as land or power, often escalates into intergroup conflict, providing a framework to understand genocides motivated by territorial or political gain. The ongoing violence in Palestine, for example, reflects these dynamics, where the struggle over land and sovereignty has resulted in systematic oppression and displacement.

The international community’s failure to act is also influenced by Groupthink (Janis, 1972), where the desire for consensus and conformity overrides moral judgment. This phenomenon often leads to inaction or silence on the global stage, as seen during the Rwandan genocide or the current situation in Palestine.

The Just-World Hypothesis (Lerner, 1980) further complicates this, as people rationalize suffering by believing that victims must somehow deserve their fate.

In conclusion, several psychological and social theories—such as dehumanization (Bandura), situational power dynamics (Zimbardo), and the bystander effect (Latané & Darley)—help explain why ordinary people, and the global community, remain indifferent to mass murder and genocide. These forces, when coupled with in-group favoritism (Tajfel & Turner), resource conflict (Sherif), and collective rationalization (Janis), create an environment where atrocities are allowed to unfold.

The ongoing genocide in Palestine is a sobering reminder that these dynamics are still at play, fueled by dehumanization, political propaganda, and international passivity.

But people still fail to understand the danger of our own ignorance and the power of our mind in determining not what is right (everyone will tell you killing children is simply evil, no?), but they will fail to recognise how the media works, for instance, in showing them "News" or the manipulation and biases behind titles of such news they rapidly scroll through... and as they form their opinions based on them, they didn't even take one minute to click on the article and read it all.

This is part of the paradox of humanity.

Our biases make us vulnerable yet make us feel invincible in our righteousness.

"Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever found any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn’t agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?" — Richard Bach

Here is a summary you should read. It takes one minute but it is key.

This model, based on the work of Gregory Stanton and Ervin Staub, emphasizes the incremental nature of genocide and serves as a crucial warning. It underscores that genocide doesn't happen overnight—it follows a clear pattern of escalating hate, dehumanization, and violence. The final step, denial, points to how perpetrators often try to erase or obscure their crimes. It’s a reminder that addressing these early warning signs is vital to prevent escalation into full-scale atrocities.

Plus, by controlling what you see and hear, media can either alert society to the dangers ahead or, conversely, facilitate the gradual acceptance of atrocities. To read more about the media's role, read our article "Polarizing Your Mind".