The Proud Executioner: Pride and the Psychology of Genocide

In this chapter, Johannes Lang considers the place of pride in the psychology of genocide. To feel proud is to feel good about oneself and one’s attachments, and we embrace our identity, our self, in part by feeling good about who we are. From this perspective, pride is an inescapable component of the good life: it expresses a sense of recognition, dignity, and self-esteem. But pride also has more sinister connotations, associated with arrogance and hubris. Drawing on the long intellectual history of pride, the chapter explores the philosophical and psychological complexities of this emotion, and asks what pride does in the context of genocide. Using examples from the Holocaust, Lang argues that pride helps sustain some of the most important social structures and psychological mechanisms involved in this kind of violence. Pride inspires loyalty and obedience; pride exacerbates the perceived distance between perpetrator and victim; and, ultimately, pride is one of the most distinctive features of the genocidal imagination: the arrogant presumption that some people have the right as well as the power to remake the very texture of humanity itself.