War offers a good example of how essence can spread from one level to another. You start out with the idea that a nation’s leader is essentially bad. From this you move to the idea that an entire nation—the nation of Iraq or Germany or Japan—is your enemy. This then translates into the idea that all the soldiers of that country—or even all the people in that country—are essentially bad. And if people are bad, that means you can kill them without feeling the sting of conscience. The United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities—cities, not military bases—and drew virtually no
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