Part one of the series can be found here.

Let us come up the rough side of the mountain.

After writing “Embracing the Repression,” I was asked about how to make courage contagious. After mulling this over for some time, I have concluded that I do not know for certain.

That said, courage has a lot to do with the internal conflict we face over what we have been taught to be moral and humanist, versus our lived experience.

I was inspired by Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni’s book Movement and Institution. In his work, Alberoni analyzed the individual psychic state well before it became a mainstream movement. Alberoni divided his analysis into three parts: (1) a person experiences depressive overload, or concludes that one’s internal conflict has become intolerable; (2) a person experiences a nascent state, or forms an idea that may address the internal conflict in a way that is meaningful to them; and (3) a person searches for affinity—finding others who share, fine tune, and diffuse a common idea, together becoming a movement. I have always thought this analysis was a brilliant way to describe the internal struggle a person goes through before acting.

Alberoni further analyzes the interaction between the movement and the societal institutions which always respond to the movement in one of four ways: (1) co-opt the movement; (2) minimize the movement’s mission by making the movement’s members feel that they are living in an unattainable fantasy world; (3) employ coercive techniques; and (4) murder certain movement members.

Alberoni is also completely agnostic about the type of movement—whether a Nazi party or a civil rights movement—which gave his approach particular valence to me. At the same time, the possibility that there might be courage in this process of developing a movement—whether repressive, murderous, or uplifting—sparked a question as to what specifics are tied to an uplifting movement.

Reflecting on Alberoni’s idea concept, I remembered a comment at a luncheon by European Union founder Michel Gaudet—the first Legal Advisor of the European Community back in 1958—that people have ideas, create institutions to preserve those ideas, those institutions gain power, and institutions are then left to determine how to use that power and for what purpose.

Gaudet offered me further insight into this notion of an idea. Unbeknownst to him, I felt an enormously positive emotion during a 1998 luncheon in his honor. After the luncheon, he wrote me a letter saying that he, too, has experienced that very same feeling. He went on to explain that the feeling I’d had during the luncheon was the same feeling he had experienced throughout his career whenever he was involved in a project that helped humanity progress. Gaudet’s insight about that palpable, shared feeling helped guide me in my own career. From that day on, I always asked myself if whatever project I worked on was helping or hurting humanity. When that positive feeling was absent, I knew to beware.

Alberoni’s agnostic analysis and Michel Gaudet’s profound advice forge a path for discerning which aspects of depressive overload lead to certain nascent state ideas, which in turn lead to seeking affinity with others, and eventually blossom into a progressive humanitarian movement.

This can all be shorthanded in a way that I found brilliant when I met a French Resistance member, and read a book by an old French Resistance member Stéphane Hessel, who after the war helped to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Resistance member said to me that he joined the Resistance because what was happening in France was unacceptable. In his book ‘Indignez-Vous,’ Stéphane Hessel succinctly described the conflicting feeling as a form of indignation at what one was seeing happening.

It seemed to me that when the emotion of indignation in all its attributes was stronger than the emotion of fear in all its detriments, courage to act would begin take root in that person.

So, just maybe, courage becomes contagious when a person experiences indignation about what they see happening, and this process helps a person overcome their fears. That one person then acts alone, leading by example, and/or seeks out others to have affinity in that indignation. This creates the movement that one believes may help humanity progress. Indignation is not enough though, for if that special emotion described by Michel Gaudet is there, then one is possibly on the right path. But, if not, that indignation may be leading to the abyss.

It is with this introduction that I turn to list-makers of oppression and repression today in the United States.

To start, for all the Artificial Intelligence (AI) passionaries in these times, I urge you to read Heather Cox Richardson’s April 11 Substack post which piqued my interest when discussing DOGE and lists of undocumented persons, to wit:

The politicization of data is also indisputable. Billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) claims to be saving Americans money, but the “Wall Street Journal” reported today that effort has been largely a failure (despite today’s announcement of devastating cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that monitors our weather). But what DOGE is really doing is burrowing into Americans’ data.

The first people to be targeted by that data collection appear to be undocumented immigrants. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported on Wednesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using a database that enables officials to search for people by filtering for “hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” including scars or tattoos, bankruptcy filings, Social Security number, hair color, and race. The system, called Investigative Case Management (ICM), was created by billionaire Peter Thiel’s software company Palantir, which in 2022 signed a $95.9 million contract with the government to develop ICM.

Three Trump officials told Sophia Cai of “Politico” that DOGE staffers embedded in agencies across the government are expanding government cooperation with immigration officials, using the information they’re gleaning from government databases to facilitate deportation. On Tuesday, DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi sent the first 6,300 names of individuals whose temporary legal status had just been canceled. On the list, which Moghaddassi said covered those on “the terror watch list” or with “F.B.I. criminal records,” were eight minors, including one 13-year-old.

The Social Security Administration worked with the administration to get those people to “self-deport” by adding them to the agency’s “death master file.” That file is supposed to track people whose death means they should no longer receive benefits. Adding to it people the administration wants to erase is “financial murder,” former SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley told Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard of the “New York Times.” Those people will not be able to use credit cards or banks.

These first 6,300 names destined for “financial murder” seem to be the equivalent of the IBM lists that the company and its engineers provided to the Nazis in Germany when they “financially murdered” Jews and dissidents, then moved on to actual murder. That path can be gone down quickly as, for example, I fear that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has been murdered. I hope I am wrong. The Department of Justice (DOJ) says he is alive and well in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador. Given the Trump administration’s penchant for lying, I will believe it when I see him returned to the United States.

In case you’ve never read it, I recommend that you read Edwin Black’s “IBM and the Holocaust” which details IBM’s aggressive pursuit of the 1933 Nazi German census contracts with their then-new punch card technology—a tool first used to aggregate all census information in Germany. This technology was the answer to Edwin Black’s question as to how the Nazis compiled lists of people to send to the death camps.

With the help of this new technology, each German resident was represented by one or a series of IBM punch cards—the cards were not standardized at 80 holes back then. Thus, one could select a card based on any criteria, feed it into the sorting machine, and the machine would generate a series of cards for people who fit those criteria. For example, those indelible numbers on Jewish and Roma people sent to the camps were represented by numbers denoted on the punch cards.

In pondering those points, I came across two items after reading Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter. The first is an interview with one of the Palantir founders. I wrote about Palantir in 2013 on The Society of American Law Teachers blog in a piece called “Big Data, Stellar Wind and Me: On Being Free Now.” And when I chaired the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Dispute Resolution back in 2017, I contacted Palantir to invite the CEO to speak at our annual meeting. While I doubted that he would accept my invitation, I thought I should alert him to the fact that he was on the radar of an unusual suspect.

This first interview in the euphemistic coded language of the “tech bros” and “tech sises” is a description of the AI future that struck me for the serfdom it relishes for vast numbers of Americans—and dare I say, the rest of the developed world joining the destitute in the developing world. As is indicated in the interview, Palantir posits that the use of AI would lead to an enormous increase in productivity, reducing current labor costs of $4 trillion to $1 trillion.

At the same time, the workers who currently earn the $3 trillion in labor costs will not miraculously disappear from America; they will get laid off. Without a financial safety net, and with no one willing to train or re-train them, they will become poor, get sick, and die. Pretty dystopian—not that it would be of any concern to the AI passionaries.

For the legal profession, Palantir has discussed a new product called Harvey which is being used by some law firms to help increase the firm’s overall productivity. Instead of firms traditionally hiring 50 associates per year, five of whom will make partner, these law firms seek to have just one partner with two associates, and 30 bots doing various types of work. This would upend the classic law firm model.

This newsletter goes into a bit more detail about Harvey and gives some names of the law firms that have started deploying this tool.

As a 69 year-old sitting here at my kitchen table, I see a relatively straight path from the Nazi’s use of IBM punch card technology to create the 6,300 undocumented “financial murder” lists to tech giants’ new vision of vast numbers of surplus workers—the Nazis called them “useless eaters”—un-adapted to tasks in our dystopian society where we let the old and young fall further into poverty, sickness, and leave them to die.

Returning to Edwin Black’s book, one of the Nazi’s first acts as they invaded and conquered Europe was soliciting help from the Head Statistician at the Statistical Office to develop the lists. In some countries, the statistician looked at the question as a kind of intellectual exercise and would come up with new and inventive ways to help the Nazis. Consequently, nearly all Jews would be sent to their deaths in the camps in countries such as the Netherlands.

In other countries—France comes to mind as the only one—the Head Statistician was surreptitiously a member of the Resistance and intentionally mucked up the work to delay the Nazi efforts to get lists. Through this ruse, the Head Statistician delayed the lists’ creation and thus the sending of Jews and others to their deaths. Nazis killed him after he was revealed to be a member of the Resistance.

I think this little vignette helps illustrate the point that technology is political, and will help those less in-the-know to avoid being naive about what is in store.

I am glad that I am 69 and not 29 for it is clear to me that these “tech bros” and “tech sises” remain completely indifferent to the suffering to come—as are their investors. It is all about the Benjamins for them. Truly, the banality of evil.

Now there are those who will argue that I am too much of a cynic and that there will be a bright, wonderful future for all as mankind’s creativity is unleashed and we are free to do much, much more! The only modest answer for those whose lives will be disrupted is that we would need to arrange for some kind of universal basic income. Pardon me for being skeptical, but people whose primary goal is amassing vast amounts of wealth for themselves would not really care.

After all that we have witnessed over the past two months, have I felt that positive feeling that Michel Gaudet said would be an indicator of something happening that would help humanity to progress? My answer is, regretfully, no.

In this way, I am reminded of the construct discussed in “The Psychopathology of Institutional Links.” In the book, one kind of actor called a “thanatophore” (death-bringer) enters an organization and internalizes in all its participants the fear of oblivion or institutional death. The internalizing of the external fear of institutions’ deaths—particularly in a recession—leads to individuals isolating themselves in the organization from each other, which results in the “thanatophore” lording over all. Of course, there are layoffs which strike fear into those within and outside of the organization.

Beyond layoffs, the scapegoating of the more vulnerable—like the undocumented—and the intimidation of the slightly less vulnerable—by implemented anti-DEI policies and pretextual policies aimed at combatting antisemitism—builds a movement of oppression. Society is divided into makers and takers—another euphemism for the more classic predators and prey.

Images of government leaders standing in front of the incarcerated with spangles on their wrists; threats to kidnap and deport anyone for any reason; intimidation of those seeking to uphold the rule of law against a state of exception; and the surreptitious erasure of people creating their social death all form the individual parts of this whole. A time for indignation to overcome the fear of being singled out. However, one must recognize that in a setting of tyranny—as Thomas Snyder noted—if one is not prepared to die in fighting it, the tyranny will win. And with the two-thirds of people who will blindly adhere to malevolent leadership,—as demonstrated in Stanley Milgram’s psychology experiments—we look to the one-third whose indignation overcomes their fear as being the few who will not go along to get along.

In that regard, the two classic rationalizations one sees to go along to get along are “I have to feed my family,” and “I have to save the organization.” Much evil is done in the name of complicity.

But what do I know.