Quoting The Zone of Interest

Quoting Martin Amis' The Zone of Interest, one of Paul Doll's completely detached rationalizations about his culpability as the (fictional, but based on the real Rudolf Höss) commandant of Auschwitz:

As I lay there, trying to free my tongue from the roof of my mouth, these questions came to me … If what we’re doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? ... The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig—why? ... Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that?

There is a placard on the office wall that says, My loyalty is my honour and my honour is my loyalty. Strive. Obey. JUST BELIEVE! And I find it highly suggestive that our word for ideal obedience—Kadavergehorsam—has a corpse in it (which is doubly curious, because cadavers are the most refractory things on earth). The duteousness of the corpse. The conformity of the corpse. Here at the KL, in the cremas, in the pits: they’re dead. But then so are we, we who obey …

In any case, as we’ve always made clear, the Christian system of right and wrong, of good and bad, is 1 we categorically reject. Such values—relics of medieval barbarism—no longer apply. There are only positive outcomes and negative outcomes.

"There are only positive outcomes and negative outcomes" is a horrifyingly accessible concept.