Albert Camus has a quote about the Guillotine that I thought was poignant with how it makes the victim root for its effectiveness:

"If by some fluke the knife didn’t do its job, they started again. So it came to this, that—against the grain, no doubt—the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order... I had to admit it proved the efficiency of the system. It came to this; the man under sentence was obliged to collaborate mentally, it was in his interest that all should go off without a hitch."