The Great Disruption

So, was flipping through The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama and came across a passage that implicates in some ways explains that horrors such as the Holocaust are not so difficult to dissect:

Ordinary morality is compatible with - indeed, is the precondition for - shocking immorality at higher levels of social organization.  A disorganized, individualistic rabble cannot pull off a systematic genocide like the Soviet killing of the kulaks during collectivization in the 1930s.  The Southern soldiers of the Confederacy who died to preserve slavery, or the Germans who carried out the Holocaust, often displayed virtues of integrity, courage and loyalty toward their own communities.  The Germans, in particular, are known as sticklers for order, unwilling to cross the street against a red light even as they marched prisoners off to concentration camps.  But the kind of ordinary morality that makes an individual not want to disobey a traffic law contributes, at a higher level of community, to the most monstrous crimes.  Our desire to be liked and esteemed and to conform leads individuals to carry out the most brutal orders when caught in an evil political system.  Morality at the level of humanity as a whole dictates that we violate deeply felt norms of loyalty and reciprocity to our particular group.  The great moral conflicts of our time have arisen not over the absence of ordinary morality, but rather over the tendency of human communities to define themselves narrowly on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, or some other arbitrary characteristic, and to fight it out with other, differently defined communities.

I'm no expert on morality but it was interesting that there are different levels of it depending on the scale one is considering.