An Education in Cruelty

Brecht’s 1926 play Man Equals Man explores the question of whether people can be arbitrarily moulded, including their beliefs. Within a week, the worker Galy Gay is »reassembled« into an unfeeling fighting machine for the British colonial army. Hardly ten years later, this is exactly what occurred with an entire society in Nazi Germany.

With the ongoing escalation of right-wing populism into right-wing extremism and finally into a new fascism, we are currently witness to a remarkably similar phenomenon. Actors such as Donald Trump and their media cheerleaders bombard their followers with a barrage of cooked-up scandals, harassment, and hatred. The former US secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem celebrates a cult of coldness, German reactionary Björn Höcke dreams of a »well-mannered cruelty«. In order to understand how this agitation changes its adherents, Robert Misik turns to the socio-psychological insights of Freud, Adorno, and Leo Löwenthal. He complements this with the most recent research findings and shows how people can be taught to be beasts.