"We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war"
About this Quote
Lorenz is warning against a moral shortcut that feels psychologically satisfying and becomes politically catastrophic: turning evil into a character. Personify evil and you get a face to hate, a story to organize around, a cosmic permission slip. It’s cleaner than grappling with mixed motives, systems, and ordinary human weakness. It also turns conflict into exorcism. If the enemy is “evil” in a quasi-spiritual sense, compromise becomes complicity, restraint becomes cowardice, and negotiation looks like bargaining with the devil.
As a scientist - and a behavioral thinker attuned to how instincts scale up into mass behavior - Lorenz is aiming at the cognitive mechanics that make violence contagious. Personification is not just rhetorical; it’s a perception hack. It collapses complexity into a single agent, then inflates that agent into an absolute. That’s where “religious war” enters: not necessarily war between formal religions, but war conducted with religious intensity, metaphysical certainty, and a purifying mission. Those are the wars that don’t end when territory changes hands, because the goal isn’t settlement; it’s redemption, cleansing, total victory.
The subtext has a 20th-century pulse: ideologies that promise salvation by naming a demon, whether racial, class-based, or national. Lorenz’s phrasing implies a chilling symmetry: once you sacralize your cause, you also sacralize your cruelty, because cruelty becomes service. His intent isn’t to deny evil as harm; it’s to deny the comfort of imagining it as an external monster. The danger starts when moral language stops describing actions and starts manufacturing enemies.
As a scientist - and a behavioral thinker attuned to how instincts scale up into mass behavior - Lorenz is aiming at the cognitive mechanics that make violence contagious. Personification is not just rhetorical; it’s a perception hack. It collapses complexity into a single agent, then inflates that agent into an absolute. That’s where “religious war” enters: not necessarily war between formal religions, but war conducted with religious intensity, metaphysical certainty, and a purifying mission. Those are the wars that don’t end when territory changes hands, because the goal isn’t settlement; it’s redemption, cleansing, total victory.
The subtext has a 20th-century pulse: ideologies that promise salvation by naming a demon, whether racial, class-based, or national. Lorenz’s phrasing implies a chilling symmetry: once you sacralize your cause, you also sacralize your cruelty, because cruelty becomes service. His intent isn’t to deny evil as harm; it’s to deny the comfort of imagining it as an external monster. The danger starts when moral language stops describing actions and starts manufacturing enemies.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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