Doppers: The Psychology of Killing

But he was not to do it in the way the Germans were doing it in the Soviet Union.  There, the Jews were being killed by mobile firing squads.  That method was too public, too inefficient and too hard on the killers psychologically.  The solution would be killing centers using gas chambers, which would require much less in the way of manpower and relieve Germans of the psychological burden of killing individual people with individual bullets.

Unless you're a psychopath, completely devoid of empathy, there's really just one way to validate doing inhumane things to other people.  You dehumanize them.  Even that's not enough; to be a proactive hunter, you need the proper motivation, the hunger, to actively seek opportunities to cause harm to others.

You have to feel a certain level of entitlement, of superiority.

This is how the polarization sets in; you think more and more highly of yourself, and look at those you would attack with an increasing level of distaste.

Whenever I set up a political war room, for instance, I tell the assembled youngsters their loathing of conservatives is a purifying force.  "Let it wash over you," I tell them.  "Step on their necks, and don't lift your foot until the day after the election.  Hurt them."

High-level political people tend to view themselves as rational actors, powerful, in control of themselves and their environments.  Politics is all just a game - they can work happily with someone in one campaign, then viscerally attack them on the next, and then work together again the one after that, because it's just business and they're just playing the game.  Nothing personal.

Can you turn on and off hate like a switch, though?  What happens when you train young recruits in the art of hate, using the language of war and violence as a frame?  Is anger a good skill to be sharpening?

Violence is not a product of mental illness.  It is a product of compromised anger management skills.

In politics, I have seen high-level staff refer to their opponents as animals, and then blatantly lie about some tactic said opponent has used as a way to get their teams angry, too.  I've seen swag made that compared competition to terrorists, or worse.  Later, in more high-level conversations, they'll throw out snide comments about their own teams.

Then there's the litany of attack ads, smears in Legislatures, self-promotion at all turns.  The message is clear - we are righteous and deserving, they are dangerous and must be destroyed.  In political terms, mind you; we're talking character assassination and votes, not extermination camps.

I've said it before, I'll say it again - being inhuman is a spectrum and it's far less of a stretch from dehumanizing your political foes so as to be brutal in verbal attacks or dehumanizing new Canadians so as to protest against them as job-stealers to rounding up undesirables and putting a bullet through their heads.

Unless the actual elimination of your foes is your goal - and you have the means to do it - hate is not the answer.  

You cannot dehumanizing others without destroying your own humanity as well, which is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany.

Not the model I think we want to follow.  If we're not careful, though, we very well could.