ALEXAN DER M ITSCHERLICH
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conditions to real human beings is approved by a collectively shared
distortion of judgment.
The differential ranging of cruelty, depending on whether such
acts are committed by individuals, culrural groups, or states, requires
that we try to find the psychic mechanisms that influence people,
especially the ways in which they feel themselves identified with the
larger group, including all the group's virtues and powers, and with
the perversions of these virtues and powers . Obviously, these identifi–
cations exist at different levels of critical consciousness when cruelty is
inflicted by a single individual, as a criminal and contemptuous act,
than when the cruelty is inflicted on a large scale, as in the persecution
of a minority. Under the protection of the group , the strategy of the
superego changes: it behaves like an opportunist, as a fellow-traveler
against its former value orientation .
In the bitter, long-standing enmity between nations or tribes, we
see cruelty liberated to a virtually incomprehensible degree . I hardly
need to remind you of the Congo and the war between Nigeria and
Biafra, or of the horrible extinction of the Armenians as described by
Franz Werfel in
The Forty Days ofMusa Dagh.
This kind of proneness
to
cruelty , transmitted as a tradition, can become part of a national or
culrural collective character. Yet we cannot follow this problem here
either. We will also leave aside the reactive cruelty which can be in–
flamed by a wave of hatred in individuals, or a group, or a nation ,
when these people are recklessly prepared for mutder and extermina–
tion of their opponents. Rather, we must speak of cruelty as a symp–
tom. The measure of unharnessed torments, to which history bears
witness inescapably , suggests a disturbance of object relations in the
sense of cognitive error-such as scapegoating-or in the sense of the
loss of the effective ability to step into another's shoes , that is, loss of
empathy . In addition , the symptom of group cruelty demonstrates the
inability of the individual to defend himself against the destructive
beliefs of his society by mobilizing the forces of either his ego or super–
ego . Effective resistance places the reasoning and resisting subject in
the unavoidable position of a strange , suspicious outsider, close to an
enemy.
When one observes the historic epidemics of collective cruelty ,
one notices that individual moral structures , which the ego is normally
capable of mobilizing, melt away . The fact that destructive capabilities
