“The Road to Auschwitz Wasn’t Paved With Indifference” is a moving article featuring people’s inability to walk on their own path and fall into social pressures. With the internet taking over the world, we have all seen a video of that one tired teenager in his class who happens to fall asleep during the lecture. Once the teacher notices he very quietly asks the other students to start clapping their hands. Once they all start clapping the sleeping student wakes up and starts clapping their hands. This is a great example of social proof. When your preception is everyone is doing it, that perception soon becomes your reality. I have fallen victim to this when I was looking for a good dessert place after a good dinner. I was walking around downtown San Francisco and saw a line that was out the door. Naturally, I waited because I thought it would be amazing. Little did I know that they just had slow service and were not the best dessert place.

When looking at different instances of social proofs influencing society, there is always an intense pressure to conform to society. Ms. Weinberg (Author of the article, and professor in philosophy) Claimed that “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but it wasn’t paved with indifference. It was paved with collaboration” (1). Because Poland was highly anti-Semitic, there was greater collaboration between the people, the police and the enforces, leading to more people doing it. According to Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt, ” The correlation between local enthusiasm and the genocidal murder rate of the Holocaust is strong and stark” (1). Unlike in Italy and Bulgaria, which had lower amounts of anti-Semitics, “the populations didn’t cooperate with the murder of Jews”(1). Although there is a dramatic difference, this can be seen in today’s school children. We try to teach them the “Upstander ideology directs us to “stand up” to bullies and hate” but this is hard because not a lot of people are doing it. (2)

Lastly, this Idea of doing it because everyone else is doing it is not always the best angle to look at things but it can be hard to turn your back on. Since a young child, whenever I would get into trouble and would blame one of my friends my mother would say “If so and so jumped off a bridge would you follow?” And To this day I know I should say no but I understand why I would say yes. Given the dramatic difference in circumstances, I can understand why some good people broke due to the social pressures during the holocaust and fearing for their lives. Through collaboration, the word was spread about what was happening and the more evil minds that talked the more it seemed that everyone was doing it, which only made the social proof power stronger. This collaboration paved the way into a more ‘accepting’ society willing to do anything to fit in and avoid sure destruction. When looking at the individual countries, the tie between the number of Anti-semitic believers and the number of murders are directly correlated. The fewer believers the less it was talked about. The less it was talked about the less it seemed people were into it which lead to lighter social pressures from society resulting in fewer murders. This power of influence is also seen in less brutal events observed in the school playground. We all understand that hate and bullying is not good amongst society, and schools have lessons on how to react and what to do. I’m not going to say the schools are wasting their time because awareness is very important, but you can not teach someone to be a hero. The only way you can teach someone to be a hero is if everyone is doing it.