History has a haunting rhythm. Again and again, societies that consider themselves civilized and moral have rationalized cruelty in the name of necessity, order, or even compassion. It’s rarely sudden; morality doesn’t collapse overnight. Instead, it erodes quietly — normalized by authority, accepted by the majority, and justified as “for the greater good.”
Two unsettling examples from European history expose how easily this process unfolds: Nazi Germany’s Kinderlandverschickung and Switzerland’s Verdingkinder system.
When Safety Masks Indoctrination
During World War II, the Kinderlandverschickung program was framed as a benevolent effort to protect German children from Allied bombings by sending them to the countryside. It sounded humane, even noble. In reality, it often served as a mechanism for indoctrination, tearing children from their families and immersing them in Nazi ideology under the guise of care. Parents were told their children were safer — and perhaps they were, physically — but the psychological and moral damage ran deeper than any air raid.
Exploitation Disguised as Welfare
Meanwhile, in neutral Switzerland well into the 20th century, tens of thousands of children were taken from poor or single-parent families and forced into servitude as Verdingkinder — literally, “contract children.” The state claimed these measures provided care and discipline for neglected youth. The reality was exploitation: unpaid labor, abuse, and lifelong trauma. A nation that prided itself on humanitarian values allowed this cruelty to persist for generations, because it wore the costume of social order.
Normalizing the Unthinkable
These aren’t isolated tragedies. They expose a universal truth: it doesn’t take overt evil to normalize the unthinkable — only enough comfort, fear, and obedience. Institutions promise safety; the public accepts convenience; and morality becomes negotiable. Once people surrender their empathy to authority, even atrocities can be dressed up in administrative language and moral certainty.
The Lesson We Keep Forgetting
Every age believes it has learned from history. But moral regression rarely advertises itself as such. It emerges through policies that sound reasonable, rhetoric that appeals to fear, and the slow fading of outrage. If we want to guard against the next iteration of cruelty, we must learn to recognize its earliest disguises — the bureaucratic euphemisms, the moral compromises, the quiet acceptance of “someone else’s problem.”
A Reflection Carried Forward
These ideas run deeper in my book Supreme Human, available on Amazon — a meditation on how power reshapes morality, and how the pursuit of “better” can sometimes conceal the worst in us. It continues this exploration of the fragile threads that hold empathy, ethics, and power in uneasy balance, and what it means to remain human when society forgets how.
Because history does not only record how low a society can fall — it warns how easily it can happen again.