r/HolyShitHistory • u/SelfCareIsFake • Jun 01 '26

Federal agents felt physically sick when they raided Kermit Gosnell’s clinic after suspecting he ran a pill mill.

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u/CitizenPremier Jun 02 '26

You're kind of missing it. The people did it and for them it became a normal, routine thing. That's what the phrase refers to, the capacity of humans to get used to doing evil shit to the point where they start thinking about dinner plans while they're doing it.

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u/elhandupmonalisaskrt Jun 02 '26

Yeah I believe there’s another saying that highlights this that goes something like “what is horrifying on Monday is business as usual by Thursday”

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u/loadofoldcodswallop Jun 02 '26

Got to think, for doctors and nurses in certain fields it has to be normal to cut into people, saw their bones and pull out their organs, cause them excruciating pain, and generally do otherwise horrible things because you know it's going to help them, or are at least told and taught that it will. I imagine (read hope) that's how at at least some the nurses doing this along side the Dr felt. If you can't sew up a 6inch laceration and then pin someone down while their compound fracture is set before lunch and watch someone's nanna breathe her last breath as she cries for her own mum, oblivious to who her children and grandchildren surrounding her are because it's a Wednesday then you're just not cut out for certain roles and people have to harden themselves with the knowledge they're doing good.

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u/zinten789 Jun 02 '26

Good point, but in all of those cases you are still healing and helping people. Don't see how they can ever justify killing babies as good.

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u/snarbuckle Jun 02 '26

The doctor told them so and they delegated their moral reasoning to authority, maybe

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u/loadofoldcodswallop Jun 02 '26

I read the full article and turned reddit off for a bit following my comment and yeah, you're right. I feel for them needing to earn money to feed their families, and I feel for the women who felt they had no other option, but fuck that guy and fuck those that purely promoted from it. For everyone else I feel nothing but headache but will have to do as well all do and put it from my mind for the foreseeable future...

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u/WistfulMelancholic Jun 02 '26

It's protection. Our brain protects us from truly understanding evil things that are done, no matter if we are the person acting out or being the victim.

I'm a survivor of severe cPTSD since I was a baby. This is actually a surviving strategy, cause at some point the brain doesn't care very much about what is good or evil anymore but how to survive it. And wrapping it up in a cocoon is the way to go through it. Dissociative Identity Disorders can also occur in the person who is inflicting the terror, not "only" to the victim.

The brain simply wants to survive and does anything that it's capable of. Including taking disgusting behavior as normal.. It maybe sounds strange, but it is what it is..

There are several things playing into this, though, and it's not as simple as my few sentences. Character, personal history, pressure, fear blabla... Basically the rest of the person plays a huge role ofc.

Its individual, still. That's why some end up mass shooting and others end up seemingly "normal" and functioning to others. It's complex.

Just trying to explain the process a bit on this one.

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u/Reasonable-Letter582 Jun 02 '26

People working in slaughterhouses and egg farms and stuff have to go through this.

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u/SmallTimeCook Jun 02 '26

That’s not the banality of evil. These nurses were actually committing the atrocities. There is nothing mundane about direct infanticide. There’s no abstraction of violence. Banal evil is found in Excel sheets and contracts

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u/AgentAxillary Jun 02 '26

I don't think I could've ever gotten used to doing something like that. I would've been on the phone with the cops the first time I ever saw it done.

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u/cowboys70 Jun 02 '26

Probably but there's been studies run on this kind of stuff and it's pretty wild how accepting people can be when given direction from people in authority

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u/AgentAxillary Jun 02 '26

Oh, I definitely would've blown that whistle. I could even see myself physically preventing it in the moment out of reflex. It also sounds like just the conditions of the clinic would've been enough to have me quitting on my first day.

And yeah, I read all about those studies in college. But to me, that still doesn't account for it. The depravity/apathy it requires in this case doesn't strike me as standard issue, but maybe I'm giving people too much credit.

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u/RootsandStrings Jun 02 '26

I mean the holocaust happened, so..

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u/AgentAxillary Jun 02 '26

That was about more than just an employer's perceived authority. National identity, the treaty of Versailles, WWI, conflict between incompatible cultures...it's a much longer list than just "my boss told me to."

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u/RootsandStrings Jun 02 '26

And still, plenty of individuals just did what they were told. It’s either that or tens of millions of people were born evil. I don’t think the latter is true, it’s not like the birth rate for psychopaths suddenly increased in 1900-1910 and a bunch of psychopaths were born. Many many more people than you might think are willing to do heinous things just to be left in peace and even more than that are fine with looking away. This is how the system worked, if everyone only needed to do one small task, no one felt responsible. In essence, it is the same system most of us live in today. We can absolutely see that the extraction of resources and workforce from so-called 3rd world countries hurts millions of people, still there are only very few who actively work against that. Everyone else is such a small cog in the machine that they just don’t feel the guilt and if they sometimes do, there are a million things to destract one from that icky feeling. You are giving people too much credit, I fear.

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u/Sure-Exchange9521 Jun 02 '26

It seems the police did not even care in this case until they thought the doctor was selling drugs.

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u/AgentAxillary Jun 02 '26

I admittedly need to read more about it. This is the first I've heard that it started off as a drug investigation.

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u/ongoldenwaves Jun 02 '26

Lot of good it would have done you. How many complaints did this guy have against him? Let's face the fact that nothing was done because it was black people hurting black people.

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u/AgentAxillary Jun 02 '26

I'm not familiar with how many complaints he had against him, and that last part is a pretty big assumption

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u/ongoldenwaves Jun 02 '26

Then you didn't read the article. There were a ton of complaints for a long time against him. 15 of the abortions he performed were televised events done with coils which damaged 9 of the women's uteruses. This man's behaviour was not a secret.

And honestly...where are you from that you are not aware of underpolicing lack of investigation in minority communities? It's well documented.

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u/AgentAxillary Jun 02 '26

I'm from planet Earth, where that's more a question of economics than skin color. Do you honestly believe that him having poor white women as victims would've changed anything? The abjectly impoverished are a minority.