Description This paper analyzes a mechanism through which moral and legal arguments cease to function as constraints within political systems. As analytical entry points, the text draws on the Nuremberg trials, the film Nuremberg, and the observations of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who worked with the Nazi leaders on trial. The paper shows that catastrophic forms of power arise not only through the direct violation of values, but also through the loss of their function as instruments of distinction. Values may persist as language and rhetoric while ceasing to operate as internal prohibitions that connect action with consequences. Under such conditions, moral argumentation loses its capacity to interrupt action, and legal mechanisms become reactive rather than preventive. A vacuum of limitation emerges in which decisions are made solely on the basis of goals and the effectiveness of means. The paper formulates the principle of recursive self-critique of form. A political system remains viable only as long as it is institutionally capable of questioning its own criteria of distinction, rather than merely their application. This text is an attempt at a conceptual description of a mechanism that has not previously received a stable language of analysis.
Anna Mia (Bilobzhytska) (Tue,) studied this question.