Thoughts for the Times on War and Death

Disillusionment

The first essay addressed the widespread disillusionment brought on by the collapse of the Pax Britannica of the preceding century—what Freud called "the common civilization of peacetime". Freud laments the collapse of the previously held idea that "the great world-dominating nations of white race" had reached a state of civilization that would prevent such continental wars in Europe from occurring. He recalls: "we had expected these people to succeed in discovering another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts of interest". On this note, Freud also writes extensively about how the war had exposed a phenomenon of "cultural hypocrites"—that is, swaths of people who had been exhibiting certain civilized codes of behavior not out of their own instinctual impulses but out of an egoistic incentive to adhere to societal norms to reap rewards in society. The war had allowed for unrestrained expressions of people's more authentic and primitive impulses. In Freud's view, the war exposed that "there are very many more cultural hypocrites than truly civilized men" and that "in reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed". Freud further expressed the view that the war had exposed that even intellectuals of a high stature may resort to narrow-minded and illogical conclusions, rooted in "emotional resistance" to logic, when such a situation as that of war arises. He comments that this was as shocking a disillusioning experience as was the decline of moral ethics during the war.