in turn supports the idea that people enforce beliefs they don’t personally hold to make themselves look sincere. And that, in turn, supports their model of pluralistic ignorance, in which a society can be taken over by a belief system that the majority of its members do not hold individually.
It’s one thing to say that a sour wine has an excellent bouquet or that academic balderdash is logically coherent. It’s quite another to confiscate the last bit of flour from a starving Ukrainian peasant or to line up Jews at the edge of a pit and shoot them. How could ordinary people, even if they were acquiescing to what they thought was a popular ideology, overcome their own consciences and perpetrate such atrocities?
The answer harks back to the Moralization Gap. Perpetrators always have at their disposal a set of self-exculpatory stratagems that they can use to reframe their actions as provoked, justified, involuntary, or inconsequential. In the examples I mentioned in introducing the Moralization Gap, perpetrators rationalize a harm they committed out of self-interested motives (reneging on a promise, robbing or raping a victim). But people also rationalize harms they have been pressured into committing in the service of someone else’s motives. They can edit their beliefs to make the action seem justifiable to themselves, the better to justify it to others. This process is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it is a major tactic of self-deception.285 Social psychologists like Milgram, Zimbardo, Baumeister, Leon Festinger, Albert Bandura, and Herbert Kelman have documented that people have many ways of reducing the dissonance between the regrettable things they sometimes do and their ideal of themselves as moral agents.286
One of them is euphemism—the reframing of a harm in words that somehow make it feel less immoral. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell famously exposed the way governments could cloak atrocities in bureaucratese:In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.287
Orwell was wrong about one thing: that political euphemism was a phenomenon of his time. A century and a half before Orwell, Edmund Burke complained about the euphemisms emanating from revolutionary France:The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. Things are never called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes called agitation, sometimes effervescence , sometimes excess; sometimes too continued an exercise of a revolutionary power.288
Recent decades have seen, to take just a few examples, collateral damage (from the 1970s), ethnic cleansing (from the 1990s), and extraordinary rendition (from the 2000s).
Euphemisms can be effective for several reasons. Words that are literal synonyms may contrast in their emotional coloring, like slender and skinny, fat and Rubenesque, or an obscene word and its genteel synonym. In The Stuff of Thought I argued that most euphemisms work more insidiously: not by triggering reactions to the words themselves but by engaging different conceptual interpretations of the state of the world.289 For example, a euphemism can confer plausible deniability on what is essentially a lie. A listener unfamiliar with the facts could understand transfer of population to imply moving vans and train tickets. A choice of words can also imply different motives and hence different ethical valuations. Collateral damage implies that a harm was an unintended by-product rather than a desired end, and that makes a legitimate moral difference. One could almost use collateral damage with a straight face to describe the hapless worker on