Becker

"Where is the object on which to focus one's new self assertion, an object that is for most people a victim? This is what we have to be constantly on guard for. The Dionysian festival reflected man's experience in the round, and so for the masochistic loss of self there was the corresponding sadistic affirmation of self: the Dionysian celebrators tore apart with their bare hands and ate raw a scapegoat or a bull to climax the ceremony. Every heroic victory is two sided: it aims toward merger with an absolute "beyond" in a burst of life affirmation, but it carries within it the rotten core of death denial in a physical body here on earth. If culture is a lie about the possibilities of victory over death, then that lie must somehow take its toll of life, no matter how colorful and expansive the celebration of joyful victory may seem. The massive meetings of the Nazi youth or those of Stalin in Red Square and Mao in Peking literally take our breath away and give us a sense of wonder. But the proof that these celebrations have an underside is in Auschwitz and Siberia: these are the places where the goats are torn apart, where the pathetic cowardliness of what it is all about on its underside is revealed. We might say that modern heroism is somewhat out of joint compared with Dionysianism, where both aspects of transcendence took place on the spot; modern scapegoating has its consummation in bureaucratic forms, gas ovens, slow rotting in prison camps. But it still is all about the real, lived terror of the individual German, Russian, and Chinese over his own life, however coldly and matter-of -factly it may be staged, whatever the clean and disinterested scientific methods used. Hannah Arendt in her brilliant and controversial analysis of Adolf Eichmann showed that he was a simple bureaucratic trimmer who followed orders because he wanted to be liked; but this can only be the surface of the story, we now see. Rubber-stampers sign orders for butchery in order to be liked; but to be liked means to be admitted to the group that is elected for immortality. The ease and remoteness of modern killing by bespectacled, colorless men seems to make it a disinterested bureaucratic matter, but evil is not banal as Arendt claimed: evil rests on the passionate personal motive to perpetuate oneself, and for each individual this is literally a life-and-death matter for which any sacrifice is not too great, provided it is the sacrifice of someone else and provided that the leader and the group approve of it".

Ernest Becker