"Committing genocide on behalf of an institution generates greater loyalty to it than merely getting people fired from their jobs on its behalf"
About this Quote
McCarthy’s line is engineered as a provocation: it drags a familiar, sanitized story about “loyalty” into the moral basement where loyalty is actually manufactured. The comparative structure is the knife. By putting “genocide” and “getting people fired” on the same continuum of institutional service, he’s not equating outcomes so much as exposing a mechanism: institutions bind followers most tightly when they implicate them in irreversible wrongdoing.
The specific intent reads less like policy argument and more like a warning about complicity as social glue. If you’ve helped an institution do something that cannot be publicly defended, you don’t just support the institution; you need it. It becomes your alibi, your community of co-guilty peers, the only narrator left who can reframe your action as duty rather than crime. Firing someone for the cause is ugly but deniable; mass violence is a one-way door. Once crossed, desertion threatens punishment, ostracism, or the collapse of the story you tell yourself to keep functioning.
Subtext: political loyalty isn’t primarily built through persuasion. It’s built through sunk costs, fear, and shared stains. The institution doesn’t merely command; it recruits people into acts that make leaving psychologically and socially expensive. That’s why the line lands like cynicism, even if it’s meant as critique: it assumes power knows exactly what it’s doing when it escalates “tests” of allegiance.
Contextually, it echoes postwar insights about totalizing regimes, purges, and “dirty hands” politics: the more an apparatus can make ordinary people participate in harm, the less it has to rely on genuine belief. Loyalty becomes less a virtue than a hostage situation you help build yourself.
The specific intent reads less like policy argument and more like a warning about complicity as social glue. If you’ve helped an institution do something that cannot be publicly defended, you don’t just support the institution; you need it. It becomes your alibi, your community of co-guilty peers, the only narrator left who can reframe your action as duty rather than crime. Firing someone for the cause is ugly but deniable; mass violence is a one-way door. Once crossed, desertion threatens punishment, ostracism, or the collapse of the story you tell yourself to keep functioning.
Subtext: political loyalty isn’t primarily built through persuasion. It’s built through sunk costs, fear, and shared stains. The institution doesn’t merely command; it recruits people into acts that make leaving psychologically and socially expensive. That’s why the line lands like cynicism, even if it’s meant as critique: it assumes power knows exactly what it’s doing when it escalates “tests” of allegiance.
Contextually, it echoes postwar insights about totalizing regimes, purges, and “dirty hands” politics: the more an apparatus can make ordinary people participate in harm, the less it has to rely on genuine belief. Loyalty becomes less a virtue than a hostage situation you help build yourself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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