For Love of the Father by Stein Ruth

Author:Stein, Ruth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Collective Evil

But dyadic evil in itself is insufficient to account for large-scale, collective, ideologically inspired acts of evil and cruelty. The conception of evil as psychic cruelty that inflicts one’s suffered trauma and soul-murder upon the other can be applied only metaphorically, filtered and amplified in an ideology fitting a corresponding group identity, in the case of fundamentalists, as when the trauma suffered by a society is kept alive as a vivid memory of victimization. Vamik Volkan has compellingly documented such cases. Volkan writes about the sense fundamentalist groups have that those outside their borders do not understand them and threaten their existence. Shared feelings of victimization then become an essential component of the collective identity of such groups, inflaming retaliatory and revengeful fantasies and acts purported to redress the humiliation and injustice. Paradoxically, because such groups anticipate threats from those without, they in fact play a role in inducing persecutory attitudes in others.12

I believe, though, that the metaphor of individual trauma is insufficient to account for lynch mobs, military massacres, ethnic genocidal governments, or a totalistic ideology of which religious terrorism is but one manifestation. These phenomena produce killings and tortures that are quantitatively and qualitatively different from individual acts of evil.13 The existence of numerous historical and actual, endlessly reverberating cycles of victimization and retribution is undeniable,14 yet there are, in my view, important additional elements in the configuration of collective evil. The psychoanalytic conception of evil as psychic cruelty that inflicts one’s suffered trauma and soul-murder upon the other omits the necessary element that could account for large-scale, ideologically inspired collective violence. For we need to recognize that what is prohibited for the individual is regularly practiced, condoned, even sanctified, by the group. In other words, the same laws or rules do not apply equally, or, rather apply inversely, to the individual and the group; the group emerges as an altogether different, and at this stage, more enigmatic, entity. What is it in groups that overturns moral laws and ethical rules? Is the violence perpetrated by collectivities only a matter of emotional amplification and group contagion, or is it also, or primarily, something inherent to the group, something structural, that is responsible for this inversion? It seems that cruel violence on a large scale has similarities with but also differences from individual cruelty. Indeed, we use a specific term to denote cruelty inflicted on large masses of people: atrocity.15 Gil Baillie gives us a hint regarding this question: “Far from being a bizarre aberration in human affairs, collective violence with its mesmerizing and socially galvanizing power was the context in which human culture first formed.” 16

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