“The Psychopathology of Civilization”
(Part IV of Political Violence as Collective Psychopathology)
by Richard Koenigsberg
“The Psychopathology of Civilization” appears below.
Click here to read the complete paper, Political Violence as Collective Psychopathology.
Perhaps the legacy of Nazism is to compel us to consider the possibility that contained within the ideology of nationalism is a severe form of psychopathology. Devotion to one’s nation may be a virtue, but also may generate monumental destruction. Hitler and Nazism force us to question the claim that willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation is a noble, beautiful idea.

What is the nature of this disease or psychopathology contained within human societies? In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt argues that Adolf Eichmann—who planned and organized the murder of millions of Jews—was not a pathological murder. Arendt accepts Eichmann’s claim that he was an ordinary, banal man who simply followed orders.

Why do we say that following orders—almost to the point of being a slave—is ordinary or banal? Perhaps it is just this tendency to submit to leaders and the groups they represent that lies at the heart of the psychopathology of human social life.

What is “ordinary” and what is “pathological” are not separate. With their ideology revolving around obedience unto death, the Nazis enacted this tendency to submit to the group and blindly follow orders—to an unprecedented degree.

Willingness to be obedient unto death—to sacrifice one’s life for Germany—was the Nazi’s highest virtue. Willingness to become obedient—to sacrifice one’s life for Germany—simultaneously defined the essence of Nazi pathology. Hitler declared to the German people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Nazism meant self-negation in the name of the glorification of Germany. For the Nazis, their highest ideal and deepest pathology were one and the same.

We begin to understand why people hesitate to use the language of psychopathology in relationship to political movements. At the heart of Nazi ideology were the ideals of respect for leaders, honor, loyalty, and a sense of duty: qualities most of us consider virtues. The ideology of nationalism is within each one of us. Each of us believes—on some level—that it is good to love one’s country and to be willing to sacrifice one’s life if one’s nation requires that we do so.

However, it was precisely the Nazis’ espousal of these virtues that led to group death. Germany’s sacred ideals and her disease were one and the same. Willingness to sacrifice for Germany became abject submission and suicidal self-destruction.

This is the crux of our difficulty: our unwillingness to say that the most highly acclaimed political virtues generate the most profound forms of political pathology.

Hitler fought in the First World War and witnessed the death and dismemberment of hundreds of his comrades. He knew—but could not say—that war was awful. In Mein Kampf, he declared that it would be a “sin to complain” about the death of so many German soldiers because, after all, “were they not dying for Germany?”

Something within each of us says that sacrificing one’s life for one’s nation is not a bad thing. Something within us says that it is a virtue to be willing to die for one’s country.

Masochism describes the psychic tendency to place oneself into a situation that may result in physical and/or psychological damage. The job of a soldier—more than any other job—may lead to severe and permanent physical and/or mental damage. Within the discourse of psychotherapy, what could be more masochistic than the willingness to become a soldier?

Yet the ideology of nationalism forbids us to call soldiers masochists. We admire a soldier’s willingness to place himself in situations of extreme danger. His willingness to sacrifice his life for his nation lies at the core of an ideology that most of us share.

Most of us feel that we belong to a national community. We say that we love our country. How can one speak of masochistic submission in the same breath as love of country? Within the framework of the cult of nationalism, it is not appropriate to say this: that willingness to die for one’s country represents a form of psychopathology.

Perhaps Hitler’s legacy is to compel us to consider the possibility that contained within the ideology of nationalism is a severe form of psychopathology. Devotion to one’s nation may be a virtue, but also may generate monumental destruction. Hitler and Nazism force us to question the claim that willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation is a noble, beautiful idea.

The monumental destructiveness of the 20th century—continuing into the 21st—grows out of the human attachment to ideals conceived as more significant than actual human beings. People submit to these ideologies, which are imagined to be greater than the self.

Human beings die and kill in the name of political doctrines like Communism, nations like Germany, or Gods like Allah. Attachment to ideologies conceived as absolutes—and willingness to commit violent acts for their sake—constitutes a significant dimension of the historical process. History, as Ernest Becker might say, reflects a series of competing immortality ideologies.

The attachment to omnipotent ideologies structures the course of “normal” political history. Wars, revolutions, acts of genocide and terror seek to glorify, promote and propagate an ideology with which individuals identify. Within this domain of politics—the competition between sacred ideologies—anything and everything is permitted. Sacred ideologies release human beings from moral structures and strictures that govern other dimensions of societal existence.

Within this political realm—the struggle between competing ideologies conceived as absolutes—no allowance is made for the language of psychopathology. Into this space or domain, psychiatry is not allowed to enter.

The historical record is an endless story of political violence, conceived as normal. Political history is imagined as occurring within a domain separate from—transcending—ordinary human existence. Within this “special place,” things occur that cannot occur within other domains of human existence. Standards that apply in our “everyday life” do not apply to what occurs in this domain.