"Our culture has made us all slaves to an idea, and idea that takes precedence over everything, over our own lives and the lives of others. And slavery to an idea is far more dangerous than slavery to a human, because we do not even know that we are slaves. We pass through our days with the freedom of a dog who never reaches the end of its leash, certain that what we see is all of reality, all there ever was, all there ever will be, all that is possible. Having enslaved ourselves to this idea, we then enslave others, passing on the knowledge of how to be a slave from father to son, father to daughter, mother to son, mother to daughter, sibling to sibling, teacher to student, owner to laborer, boss to employee, slave to slave''.

Jensen

“The distance we feel from our actions is proportionate to our ignorance of them; our ignorance, in turn, is largely a measure of the length of the chain of intermediaries between ourselves and our acts. … As consciousness of the context drops out, the actions become motions without consequence. With the consequence out of view, people can be parties to the most abhorrent acts without ever raising the question of their own role and responsibility. Wage earners who insert the fuse in bombs can view their activity as but a series of repetitive motions performed for a living. Railroad workers who take trainloads of prisoners to extermination camps can think of themselves as simply providing transportation. … The remarkable thing is that we are not unable to recognize wrong acts or gross injustices when we see them. What amazes us is how they could have come about when each of us did none but harmless acts. We look for someone to blame then, for conspiracies that might explain the horrors we all abhor. It is difficult to accept that often there is no person and no group that planned or caused it all. It is even more difficult to see how our actions, through their remote effects, contributed to causing misery. It is no cop-out to think oneself blameless and condemn society. It is the natural result of large-scale mediation which inevitably leads to monstrous ignorance.”

John Lachs