On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

by Dave Grossman

Erich Fromm states that “there is good clinical evidence for the assumption that destructive aggression occurs, at least to a large degree, in conjunction with a momentary or chronic emotional withdrawal.” The situations described above represent a breakdown in the psychological distance that is a key method of removing one’s sense of empathy and achieving this “emotional withdrawal.” Again, some of the mechanisms that facilitate this process include: - Cultural distance, such as racial and ethnic differences, which permit the killer to dehumanize the victim - Moral distance, which takes into consideration the kind of intense belief in moral superiority and vengeful/vigilante actions associated with many civil wars - Social distance, which considers the impact of a lifetime of practice in thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment - Mechanical distance, which includes the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim