"This lack of response I am
trying to sum up by the phrase 'moral insensibility', and I am suggesting
that the level of moral sensibility, as part of public and of private life,
has sunk out of sight. It is not the number of victims or the degree of
cruelty that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts committed and
the acts that nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in
an uncanny, even a schizophrenic, manner. The atrocities of our time are
done by men as 'functions' of a social machine--men possessed by an abstracted
view that hides from them the human beings who are their victims and, as
well, their own humanity. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.
They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; they are not aggressive
but merely efficient; they are not emotional at all but technically clean-cut"
(The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 83-84).