SS Supervisor Dorothea Binz was only a 23-year-old girl when she started to torture and kill prisoners (sometimes kicking them to death) at Ravensbrück. If you are like me you sort of did a double-take to make sure you read that right.

And, if you are like me, you probably thought to yourself something like, "Those Nazis were pure evil. Horrible non-people that the world was well rid of when they were captured, tried and convicted, then executed." (Binz was hanged by the British Government in 1947.)

Um, except that on further reflection, you might have wondered how it was even possible for a young woman to get into such a state of animal violence. How could you make a person into such a murderer? Is it just that overused poorly-understood concept of "conditioning"? Well, not really. It relates back to the conviction of Race of Destiny (as in the Master Race mentality) and the concept of Cognitive Dissonance.

Here, think about an example of cognitive dissonance in my own life, just so you can see a second, simple and fairly harmless example of it:

When I was a smoker at university, I was faced with the rather obvious knowledge that smokers are subject to some pretty serious health problems. The longer one smoked, the higher the risks, the worse the quality of life, and even the more the social stigma. What was I to do? I was faced with a cognitive dissonance: I smoke but smoking is bad. And that dissonance is as hard to live with as chronic back pains or intense hunger; it flavours everything. So I needed a solution that was as quick and as all-encompassing as possible. So I developed a belief: "Smoking may shorten my life, but the enjoyment of my life is much greater. Look at the people in the smoking section of the cafeteria at school: We laugh and talk and play cards while the people in the non-smoking section sit quietly with their heads down reading or napping. I live a much more social and interesting life." And I ignored the negative social effects of smoking, such as being prohibited from certain venues while smoking, being repeatedly told I smelled smoky, missing about 1/2 the potential romantic situations to the girls who didn't like smokers (this was university: such things were important!), and other things. In short, I focused on the social benefits of smoking and de-emphasized the negative social aspects. And I completely ignored the health issues, just focused on the selective evidence that the quality of my life was greater.

So that's one example of cognitive dissonance and how the mind copes with it. In an nutshell: When we are faced with two ideas that are logically inconsistent we make up a belief system to confirm our justification. We cherry-pick the available information to support that belief system.⁽¹⁾

I do, you do (don't deny it), we all do. We do it because it is impossible to live without a set of beliefs based on partial data. Knowing all the facts about everything would paralyze us into inaction; information overload would grind us to a halt. So we start with this as a coping and survival skill ... but it is a survival skill that can turn against us much the same way an immune system can turn against itself. We can suddenly turn a blind eye to the information that would otherwise inform us and improve us. Instead of saying, "Oops, this is not right. I am wrong here and need to change," we reject and minimize the information. The anxiety that rises up in us must somehow be quashed, even if we use justification after the fact to do it. When confronted, we can either say, "I guess I was wrong and cruel ... " or we can say, "that person was wrong and deserved it ...." In the case of the latter, we eventually become so certain of our rectitude that we stop thinking about it.

Back to Dorothea Binz: She probably never lost sleep over chopping someone to death with an axe (allegedly), or sending thousands to their deaths (definitely), since she was certain in her belief that she was part of the Master Race. She was merely killing off an animal—something unimportant. And to justify that belief, she and others in those death camps used the evidence that, when fenced in like animals, deprived of basic human sanitation and medicine like animals, stripped of all human dignities like animals, prisoners behaved like animals. They ignored the means and focused on that "evidence". Ergo (to their minds) the prisoners really were animals, and the captors really were the superior race. And, don't forget, that selective reasoning was borne of a perfectly natural—a necessary—human survival skill.

We'd all do well to remember that, lest we think that we are not capable of such brutality ourselves. We must learn from history, not the historical facts out of context, but the very human conditions that led to atrocity, since facts alone are not enough to avoid repeating mistakes. By understanding how people went from naturally and logically coping with their world to creating a nightmare of butchering and slaughtering others, we might possibly be able to hang on to the social convention we call civility. It's paradoxical but true:

⁽¹⁾ I have a friend who is delighted to talk about anything "wrong" with me and my life. He usually (though not always) waits for me to mention it first, but then pounces and—often with a happy contented grin on his face—likes to talk about my shortcomings. When faced with his own, though, he typically grows quiet and fidgety, shows repressed aggressive body language, refuses to talk except in strange little outbursts, and generally ... well, demonstrates that his own cognitive dissonances are in full swing. I mention this because my smoking is one of his favourite topics. He likes to talk about my "mistake" of smoking at great length in order that he can, I guess, feel better about his own life comprised of long-lost social opportunities when he was a younger man. I don't mind saying this about him now because after he found out that I joined Mensa he practically never talks to me, and I'm pretty sure he's stopped scanning my rants too (he never read them, just the first paragraph, then would phone to tell me why he thought I was wrong, often based on a misunderstanding of my point). If you think I'm writing this to evoke a cognitive dissonance in him, you are absolutely right :-)