Flutterby™! : decisions, decisions

[Further Edit: Reading the book now. it's fascinating, and I think that I was misrepresenting Rees' thesis in the places where Pete was disagreeing. More later]
[Edit: Pete makes a convincing argument that Laurence Rees is full of crap and I need a better look at history, so feel free to ignore this post...]

Had the rat boys over for dinner last night, and this morning ended up driving Alec's book bag over to him at school. In the process, heard a bit of Laurence Rees on Fresh Air. Rees is author of Auschwitz: A New History, but unfortunately that book doesn't sound nearly as interesting as the discussion on the show. In it he talked about the differences between Nazism and other regimes that we often compare it to, like Stalinism. Rees' opinion is that one of the things that differentiated Nazism was that, unlike most totalitarian regimes, it was a social structure that actively encouraged innovation. Radical solutions within the framework and belief structure were encouraged, and the eventual emergence of the death camps wasn't initially planned, but lead from decision to decision until those who implemented the "work them 'til they die then kill them" felt like that was the only way to accomplish the overarching goal because circumstances had lead them to that stage.

I'm not doing his sequence justice, but he described a decision making process that started with the desire to expel the Jews from Germany, but when they couldn't find other nations to emigrate to, ghettos were created. Isolated, the economy was closed, which meant that soon those inside the ghetto couldn't buy food. The solution proposed was an organized labor system, from which they could earn food. But, of course, you have those who couldn't work, the artificially low wages didn't allow support of non-working members of the community, and this lead step by step to the conclusion that killing large numbers of people was the more humane option.

Through decision chains like this, Germans could accept a belief chain that started with "the Jews control Churchill, and Churchill won't let Jews living in Germany emigrate to England" and ended with "Jews brought the Genocide on themselves".

This struck a particular chord recently because I've been seeing a lot of places where there's a cultural willingness to base a decision structure on flawed premises. And while I could force and stretch some issues of national importance into these modes, I'm thinking more of simple corporate politics; situations where it becomes accepted that, say, someone who refined a piece of code was the originator of the technique, thus the original implementor is stuck trying to work within that flawed belief structure, because a direct attempt to take credit would be interpreted as backstabbing or disloyalty. Once we find a belief system that makes sense we build on it, rather than periodically re-checking our premises to make sure that the decisions we're making are still valid in the broader context of reality.