They don't have to live in a brutal totalitarian state. It's astonishing how quickly people can turn into monsters. Read Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. It's the story about how absolutely ordinary German policemen were induced to become entirely voluntary accomplices in the Nazi "final solution" in newly conquered Poland -- and these were not kids who had been brainwashed in the Hitler Youth. They were not ideological Nazis. They were ordinary, middle-aged German civil servants who grew to adulthood well before the Nazis ever took power. And they still become monsters, without coercion.
Read about the Stanford Prison Experiment, of 1971. It was a mere two-week experiment run by the psychology department of Stanford University. Citizens who volunteered were chosen at random to be either guards or prisoners. The resulting experiment has been referenced and critiqued as one of the most unethical psychology experiments in history, and it was ended early because it was getting alarmingly out of hand. What is remarkable about it is how, in a mere two weeks, the absolutely ordinary, average people who played the guards became guilty of truly shocking cruelty toward their fellow human beings.
I don't wonder for an instant that a group of guards, kept apart from the clones, given power over them, who can see that they behave almost like children because they are so new to the world and ignorant, develop a sense of superiority, and easily dehumanize the clones, so that they just flat out don't see them as real people. When the clones run from the operating room in terror and get put down, the guards see them like video game characters, nothing more. There is abundant historical precedent for people treating other human beings this way -- not manufactured clones, which we cannot yet create, but real, fellow homo sapiens -- so no, this doesn't strike me as implausible in the slightest degree.
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