In a tyrannical regime, professional ethics matter more

Timothy Snyder wrote succintly On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century during the first Trump presidency. Lesson 5 reminds us that professional ethics matter more in the face of authoritarianism:

When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

Date

November 6, 2024

Read and write like your life depends on it Words to live by from Adrienne Rich (where would we be without her?): You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it (emphasis Rich’s).

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Resilient vs divisive power Divide, divide again and conquer. Sexual hierarchies, we found, are always at the service of a project of domination that can sustain itself only

In a tyrannical regime, professional ethics matter more

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