Desire, acceptance, and will to exterminate: on the ultimate foundations of exterminist violence

Deseo, aceptación y voluntad de exterminio: sobre los fundamentos últimos de la violencia exterminista

Alberto Javier Ribes

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Recibido: January 26, 2022–Aceptado: December 2, 2022–Publicado: January 1, 2024

Forma de citar este artículo en APA:

Ribes, A. J. (2024). Desire, acceptance, and will to exterminate: on the ultimate foundations of exterminist violence. Revista Colombiana de Ciencias Sociales. 15(1). https://doi.org/10.21501/22161201.4094

Abstract

Simple exterminist brutality is one of the constants that characterize modern history. The aim of this article is to approach the understanding of the ultimate foundations of exterminist violence, that is, what is behind the desire and the will to exterminate. To this end we analyze the works of Spencer, Sumner, and de Maistre. The strategy adopted in these pages aims to transform the events of the last two hundred years into presences, along with current events, setting them all in motion. The article argues that the keys to understanding this phenomenon lie in the complex relations between inclusion-exclusion/expulsion/extermination, which are traversed by a set of discourses and practices: competition and the legitimization of inequality, hierarchy, the ontology of death, denial, and complicity. We conclude with the typical-ideal picture of two social scenarios and their relations with exterminist dynamics: one based on inclusion and the other based on exclusion/expulsion.

Keywords

Violence; Exclusion; Inclusion; Exterminism; Collective Violence; Social Darwinism; Social Theory.

Resumen

La simple brutalidad exterminista es una de las constantes que caracterizan la historia moderna. El objetivo de este artículo es aproximarse a la comprensión de los fundamentos últimos de la violencia exterminista, es decir, a aquello que hay detrás del deseo y de la voluntad de exterminio. Para ello, se examinan las obras de Herbert Spencer, William G. Sumner y Joseph de Maistre. La estrategia que se adopta en estas páginas pretende transformar en presencias los acontecimientos de los últimos doscientos años, junto con los acontecimientos actuales, poniéndolos a todos en movimiento. En el artículo, se sostiene que las claves para entender este fenómeno residen en las relaciones complejas entre inclusión-exclusión/expulsión/exterminismo, que se ven atravesadas por un conjunto de discursos y prácticas: la competencia y la legitimación de la desigualdad, la jerarquía, la ontología de la muerte, la negación y las complicidades. Se concluye con la exposición típico-ideal de dos escenarios sociales y su relación con las dinámicas exterministas: uno basado en la inclusión y, el otro, en la exclusión/expulsión.

Palabras clave

Violencia; Exclusión; Inclusión; Exterminismo; Violencia colectiva; Darwinismo social; Teoría social.

Introduction

As though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world.

—H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

 

It is estimated that, in the 20th century, between 167 and 175 million people were killed in genocides and massacres organized, sustained, or permitted by states, excluding military casualties and the civilians who died as a result of the various wars that took place in that century (Morrison, 2006, p. 54). Massacres, genocides, and exterminist dynamics are a constant in the history of modernity. However, on too many occasions, academic socio-political and historical analyses either ignore these realities or limit themselves to analyzing the detailed development of a specific case.

This approach allows us to know in great detail some of these processes, which is necessary and fundamental for the advancement of social-scientific knowledge. However, it can be complemented with more inclusive analyses and with a higher level of abstraction that allows to outline models that shed light, in greater depth and from a sociological approach, the dynamics that operate in these different and diverse specific socio-historical cases, as well as the contemporary events.

It is with this objective, and from this perspective that these pages are written. The aim is to approach an understanding of the ultimate foundations of exterminist violence, that is, what lies behind the desire and will to exterminate. This problem will not be treated here as a historical issue but as a dynamic present throughout modernity, appearing and disappearing in different parts of the planet and historical moments and operating today. To paraphrase Lefebvre (2017, pp. 33-35), the strategy adopted in these pages aims to transform the events of the last two hundred years, along with current events, into presences and set them all in motion. A similar strategy was adopted by Kara Walker (2017) in her work Christ’s Entry into Journalism.

As Mann (2005) showed, massacres, genocides, and exterminist dynamics have taken place in modernity under the protection of different political-institutional systems and political regimes and have been led and perpetrated by different political movements with very disparate genesis, trajectories, and ideologies. Therefore, a sociological approach will be used. Although the former have been some of the fields par excellence of research on these issues, as can be seen in the literature on genocides, it seems that we cannot find the independent variable in its margins.

In order to understand the ultimate foundations of exterminist violence, we will first establish an analytical approach to three typically modern forms of violence: banoptic logics, expulsion logics, and exterminist logics. Then, we will address the fine line that separates “brute simplicity” (Sassen, 2014, p. 216) from simple exterminist brutality. To do this, we will return to Simmel’s idea of the autonomization of the means. Additionally, we will address the relationship between competition and the acceptance of inequality among human beings by analyzing some significant fragments from Spencer’s and Sumner’s works. Subsequently, we will analyze the relationship between hierarchy and inequality through the works of de Maistre and Sumner. Furthermore, we will reflect on the ontology of death. And then, we will deal with complicities and collective denial.

We will conclude by gathering and making sense of the various pieces scattered throughout the article, enunciating what we will call Sumner’s paradox, and pointing out the complex relations between inclusion-exclusion/expulsion and exterminism. What is presented is an analysis from the sociological theory of desire, acceptance, and the will to exterminate based on some underlying sociological currents crystallized in some fundamental concepts, practices, and dynamics of the last two hundred years.

This article’s spatiotemporal frame of reference is the exterminist violence developed over the last two hundred and twenty years: from the 19th century to the present day, we find numerous cases and examples in global history in which these logics have been deployed. To mention only a few of these cases, which serve as the empirical basis for the work presented here, we could cite those that have taken place in these two centuries: the case of the Native Americans in North America, the Aborigine peoples in Australia, the Armenian genocide, the Herero people genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, the exterminist violence in the USSR, the exterminist violence in Indonesia, the genocide in Cambodia, the genocide in Rwanda, the violence in Darfur, the genocide in Bosnia, or the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. This text is framed within the sociology of collective violence (Gerlach, 2010; Semelin, 2005), the sociology of exterminist violence (Ribes, 2019), and the sociology of genocides (Ribes, 2021; Shaw, 2015; Hinton, 2012; Kuper, 1982).

Nowadays, more than ever, the efforts of theoretical understanding and analysis are necessary. The abandonment of theory is not only an internal problem of the social sciences but is closely related to the evolution of today’s societies. As Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) wrote, “the blocking of the theoretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion” (p. 16). Let us use the theoretical imagination, then, in the hope of contributing to the avoidance of political delusion.

Banoptic logics, expulsion logics, and exterminist logics

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

—W. Benjamin, Illuminations

In recent years, Han (2016. 2017; 2014) has insisted on what, for him, represents an essential mutation in contemporary societies. In his view, we are witnessing a change in the form of social control. Accepting Foucault’s (1995, pp. 136-137) basic model, in which disciplining bodies through supervision and coercion becomes a constant to generate utility-docility, Han (2014, 2017) observes that after this phase of normalization, we would have entered a new moment, whose main characteristic is not forced inclusion or disciplining but exclusion. The panoptic devices of surveillance and supervision would thus give way to banoptic devices of surveillance and supervision.

The banopticon, made possible by big data and the enthusiastic collaboration of citizens constantly exposed to a multitude of technodigital artifacts, operates as a negative selection mechanism whereby certain individuals are progressively eliminated from the game. As Han (2017) writes, “The digital panopticon thrives on its occupants’ voluntary self-exposure” (p. 39). Punishment is replaced by the impossibility of accessing credit, for example, by pure exclusion from specific social spaces. Current societies would not, therefore, be so interested in normalizing the population (Foucault, 1995, p. 183) through a mere extension of a perfected panopticon, which would become a “super-panopticon” that would question individuals through databases, understood as a performative discourse (Poster, 1995, pp. 85-94), but would operate in a sort of social organization of exclusion based on discarding individuals who are considered as surplus, in the manner of Bauman’s “human waste” (2004).

Han’s analyses are closely related to the crisis of the Welfare State model, whose main aspiration was the inclusion of all citizens. Now, according to Han, systematic exclusion is starting to operate. One of the pathways to legitimized and brutal physical violence is organized exclusion, whether it adopts these new contours that Han outlines or adopts other formats such as ethnic, religious, or ideological exclusions, and the various combinations among these three elements, typical of 19th and 20th-century societies. The other is the expulsions that sometimes overlap with exclusions but in which the categorization and domination of certain persons or groups acquires a more physical, direct, and immediate character.

Saskia Sassen (2014) has argued how groupings of powerful actors, markets, technologies, and governments have generated “predatory formations” that have triggered, since the 1980s, a new phase that “reinvented mechanisms for primitive accumulation” (p. 12), whose main effects, so far, have been the increased concentration of capital in a few hands and systematic expulsions (economic, social, and in the biosphere). Thus, in our time, according to Sassen (2014), “complexity and technical progress serve causes of brute simplicity” (p. 216). This new capitalist accumulation would be operating, like the primitive accumulation described by Marx (1976), as an “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2004) that deploys various types of violence in order to make accumulation and dispossession possible.

Marx (1976) powerfully described the history of primitive accumulation as the original sin, as a process characterized by violence: “And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” (p. 875). As Sassen (2014) points out, the expelled are thrown outside by means ranging from the expulsion from their wages and wealth, from the labor market, from their homes and land to the elimination of their livelihoods and even physical elimination.

It is precisely at the limit of physical extermination where we find the third of the dynamics: the exterminist logics, which can be understood as a mode of production (Frase, 2016; Thompson, 1980) or as a form of legitimized and modern physical violence (Ribes, 2019). From a quantitative point of view, we know that exterminist logics function as a sort of exponential accelerators of murder and destruction, whose extension and depth make them hardly comparable to the becoming of habitual criminality. As Morrison (2006, p. 55) explains, and to give a dramatic example, the genocide in Cambodia, which occurred over three years between 1975 and 1979, and in which two million people were murdered, is the equivalent of 3,616 years of “normal” criminality.

From the point of view of social theory, exterminist dynamics, which have been scarcely theorized in the last two hundred years, are dramatically on the fringes of the core interests of the sociological discipline. These types of violence are no longer usually presented as anomalies in the course of modernity but, at best, as the hidden face of modernity or possibilities inscribed in the foundations of modern societies (Bauman, 2010; Mann, 2005).

Suppose we carefully contemplate the cases in which exterminist violence has exploded throughout the 19th, 20th, and almost two decades of the 21st century in various parts of the planet. In that case, we will be forced to acknowledge that it is not an anomaly or a possibility inscribed in modernity but a constant of modernity itself. Applying Lefebvre’s (2017) metaphor of rhythm, we could consider that exterminism operates as a constant harmony, while the quantitative explosion, which takes place at times, operates as a sort of melody with higher or lower notes, with more or fewer numbers of people eliminated that constitute, usually, the object of attention of scholars. Many notes are missing in this melody since not all the cases are well known, and, therefore, they are not considered, analyzed, and studied, given the obstacles to accessing information about them.

On too many occasions, some cases are normalized, legitimized, or boldly concealed by various actors, starting with the perpetrators. The combination of this constant rhythm and the collection of these strident notes is the sad and shattering sound of modernity. At times, modernity sounds like the industrial and post-industrial revolutions, the primacy of science and instrumental rationality, bureaucratization, capitalism and its mutations, and colonialism. Nevertheless, one of its fundamental rhythms, one of its uninterrupted and constant sounds, is the rhythm of exterminism. If so, what underlying elements have run through the last two hundred years and help us understand the fundamentals of exterminism? In the pages that follow, we will address this issue.

Simple exterminist brutality and autonomization of the means

The brute simplicity mentioned by Sassen (2014) can easily become simple exterminist brutality. If, for Sassen (2014), the logic of contemporary expulsions is hidden under the supposed complexity but responds to a simple and brutal decisive issue, such as the accumulation by dispossession, we are interested in knowing in these pages how this brute simplicity can be transformed, and it is sometimes transformed, into exterminist dynamics, or into what we call here simple exterminist brutality. We are interested, then, in the possible transit between brute simplicity and simple brutality, paying attention to what these transits have meant, how they have been structured in the past, how they do so now, and how they will do so in the near future. Then, a fundamental question is whether this logic of intensified violence—initially deployed as processes of exclusion and systematic expulsion of groups and individuals—can be autonomized and gain ground at the center of the social aspect.

Simmel (2004) said that the human being is the animal capable of establishing long causal chains of means and ends: it is a “purposive” animal (Simmel, 2004, p. 211). The problem, he added, is that the means often autonomize themselves and become ends themselves. The determination of ends brings us the possibility of the future, just as memory brings us the existence of the past. In any case, the creation of ends is what forces us to generate means (instruments, social institutions) that bring individuals closer to those ends. Nonetheless, and simultaneously, the means also generate new ends. Thus, “all enduring human associations . . . have a tendency to acquire purposes for which they were not originally conceived” (2004, p. 212).

The importance of the means is directly related to the ends they promise, thereby creating an autonomization of the means with respect to the specific ends. The most complex cultures are composed, according to Simmel (2004), of the increase of desires and means to reach such ends: “The multiplicity as well as the length of teleological series” (p. 362), and the increase of intermediate steps that are chained and must be followed to reach a specific end. Nevertheless, this agglomeration of means and ends demands the appearance of an ultimate end that gives meaning to all this chaos. Furthermore, this is where money appears in all its glory since it is merely a means that is not tied beforehand to a specific end. Hence, the primacy of money in modern societies. It would appear as pure potentiality and, therefore, as the very center of the social system.

What interests us in Simmel’s analysis is how, in his view, the means become independent of the ends. Applied to our object of interest, we can understand that although the violence of exclusion and expulsion can be simple means to achieve other ends (moral or predatory), there are moments when the means become ends and separate from them, and violence is transformed and becomes exterminism. Arendt (1970) already warned that “the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals” (p. 4). Thoreau (2004), for his part, understood that one of the main elements of modernity was the seemingly inevitable logic that leads to human beings eventually becoming “the tools of their tools” (p. 37). Somehow, as is well known, the autonomization of social orders, social institutions, and tools, and their consequent transformation into something that returns and looms menacingly over their creators, is one of the constants in the sociological analysis from its first classical attempts to the present day.

We must try to understand the phenomenon of exterminist violence not only as a means to an end, nor as a consequence of some higher process that activates and shapes it (capitalism, colonialism, the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, neoliberalism), but as something that, in addition to being linked to the phenomena described, transcends them and remains, and is capable of appearing linked to different economic, political, and social configurations.

However, in what games of means/ends do we find the violence of exclusion, the violence of expulsion, and, ultimately, the violence of extermination? What interactional dynamics, discourses, and practices are at the basis of such types of violence? Without intending to be exhaustive, we can point out some of them: competition and legitimized inequality, hierarchy, the ontology of death, complicities, and collective denial. Let us now examine all these elements.

Competition and legitimized inequality

First God: Do people here have a hard time of it?

Wong: The good ones do.

First God: What about yourself?

Wong: You mean I’m not good. And I don’t have an easy time either!

—B. Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan

Competition, understood as the “struggle for life,” is one of the fundamental pillars of modernity. The roots of the idea of the struggle for life must obviously be traced back to social Darwinism. The concept of social Darwinism is indeed misleading. Here, we must agree with Banister (1979), who considered that the label of social Darwinism had been used as an “anti-utopian blueprint of a world guided solely by scientific considerations” (p. 10), as a sort of label that collected the worst ideas of the 19th century concerning the organization of society; a name, after all, in which different variations of evil were collected. Banister himself shows how this label contributes to generating more confusion than clarity when we try to approach the ideological-cultural body that is being formed throughout the 19th century,

The reason for this is that, although today the discredit of social Darwinism, understood as an intellectual movement, is complete, the same cannot be said of some of the fundamental ideas associated with this label, which have become a central part of certain ideological discourses and political projects, as well as of common sense knowledge, of tacit knowledge, of individuals and societies (Garfinkel, 2006; Durkheim, 2003) intermittently, from the mid-19th century to the present day. The notion of social Darwinism has served to collect the worst intellectual ideas and the colossal barbarities thought, written, and carried out in the 19th and 20th centuries, making it possible to separate some of those ideas that appear under a different format and presentation at other moments. It also obscures the intersections, alliances, and hybridizations between different ideological bodies.

The concept of social Darwinism is a reification that obscures more than illuminates since it denies access to the real and specific components and contents and the subtle varieties and differences between different positions that fall under this label. Nevertheless, above all, such a concept disconnects its components, which reduces the label of social Darwinism to a straw enemy that synthesizes and exhibits all possible evil and excludes from responsibility the particular contents, the specific concepts and ideas, as long as they are presented in individual formulations and reformulations, isolated from the whole. The construction of the failed ideal-type of social Darwinism is today an obstacle to understanding the ultimate foundations of exterminist violence.

One of the components associated with social Darwinism, as we said at the beginning of this epigraph, which nevertheless exceeds and transcends it, is the idea of competition, understood in a very particular way as the struggle for life. Hofstader (1941) understood that the concept of competition and the idea of the struggle for life in social Darwinism legitimized the liberal economic order. In Sumner’s work, according to Hofstader (1941), the struggle for life and the idea of progress found in the production of capital and the productivity of labor the means for the advancement of Western civilization. According to Hofstader’s critique, in the aggressive and competitive worldview of social Darwinism, there was no room for equality and hardly any room for democracy.

Paxton (1998) pointed out the function of social Darwinism as an intellectual quasi-manifesto in the foundations of fascism. The struggle for life would thus stimulate the unleashing of violence and the glorification of will. Social Darwinism was essential in reshaping liberalism since it focused, at the time, on extreme competitiveness, which was legitimized for the benefit of human societies and the future of individuals. In the sociological discipline, Spencer and Sumner represent the best efforts to interpret the world from coordinates that emphasize the struggle for life, legitimize inequality, and advocate ruthless competition among individuals, social groups, or countries.

Spencer (2002) developed a social theory complementary to Darwin’s postulates, based on a defense of the liberal order and an absolute distrust of the state. He even coined the concept of the “survival of the fittest,” which was to be used as a complement to the concept of “natural selection” and which also gave room to the development of the sociological legitimization of eugenics. The Spencerian concept of the survival of the fittest was adopted by Darwin himself (at Wallace’s suggestion) and was included from the fourth edition onwards in The Origin of Species in 1868, according to Paul (1988).

Spencer’s formulation is very crude, as evidenced by his faith in the aggressive competition of all against all as the driving force of the social and political engine. Thus, Spencer (1884) writes:

Placed in competition with members of its own species and in antagonism with members of other species, it dwindles and gets killed off, or thrives and propagates, according as it is ill-endowed or well-endowed. ... If the benefits received by each individual were proportionate to its inferiority—if, as a consequence, multiplication of the inferior was furthered, and multiplication of the superior hindered, progressive degradation would result; and eventually the degenerate species would fail to hold its ground in presence of antagonistic species and competing species. (p. 104)

Spencer’s project sought to favor the reduction of state interference and the substitution of military-state regulations by contract and cooperation. Therefore, his conception was linked to a particular reading of Darwin, which implied the assumption that those who could not compete in the struggle for life, those who were not the best, would disappear, which would benefit humanity in the medium and long term. In this way, poverty becomes guilt, and misery is explained by the very moral inferiority of those who suffer it: “They are simply good-for-nothings, who in one way or other live on the good-for-somethings—vagrants and sots, criminals and those on the way to crime, youths who are burdens on hard-worked parents” (Spencer, 1884, pp. 32-33).

For Sumner (1919a), the concept of the struggle for existence was so fundamental that he even placed it as the very object of his sociology, in that classic 19th-century game in the sociological discipline whereby each author felt obliged to define the discipline. Sociology, Sumner wrote, “is a science which deals with one range of phenomena produced by the struggle for existence, while biology deals with another” (1919a, p. 173). Thus, sociology should deal with the competition among life forms, while biology should deal with the struggle for life against nature. Like other classicists and social Darwinists, Sumner intended to elaborate a sociological science capable of identifying natural laws.

According to Sumner (1919a), “the law of the survival of the fittest was not made by man and cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest” (p. 177). From Sumner’s point of view, this idea was sufficient to explain the vast error of socialist doctrines and any interventionist effort aimed at avoiding competition and reducing inequality. He believed that labor and capital, which are based on effort and self-denial, were the remedies for poverty and other social problems. However, in his view, certain types of people were incapable of effort and self-denial, which made him wonder if it might be a good thing to eliminate such people. Sumner did not seem to be in favor of proposing such an extreme measure, but there is a dark and sinister background to his work that we can characterize as a eugenic desire. He does not have a firm eugenic will, which will be developed and put into practice soon after in Europe and America, but he does have a fantasy of the disappearance of certain types of people. Thus, writes Sumner (1919a): “It would have been better for society, and would have involved no pain to them, if they had never been born” (p. 187)1.

There is no extermination plan in Sumner (neither a desire nor a will to exterminate), just as we do not find a road map for sterilizing certain categories of people. Nevertheless, a clear eugenic desire derives from his conception of the social aspect and the assumption of the theoretical principles we are dealing with: the supposed natural law of the struggle for existence, the sacralization of competition, and the legitimization of inequality.

The eugenic desire, in short, presupposes the combination of the assumption of competition as the driving force of humanity, together with the explicit acknowledgment that certain human beings—the weakest, the least able, those who would not survive in any case—might as well not have been born at all so that their disappearance and the extinction of their qualities and characteristics would take place in a gentle manner and without the need to exert any type of violence upon them. Sumner seems to be trying to say that it would have been better for them and us if they had not existed. Inequality and the unequal capacities and aptitudes of human beings, in a context of savage competition, once weakness is conceived (different abilities, as we would say today, and socio-historical conditions which generate all types of inequality), become a dangerous combination that leads to imagine a future without a large part of society.

In Sumner’s (1919b) view, since nature has no empathy, societies should have none either: “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set up in him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness” (p. 252). This brutal way of conceiving human societies was criticized early on by authors such as Loria (1896), who considered that the struggle for life in societies was best described by the metaphor of “parasitism.” The struggle against social Darwinism meant for Loria (1896) the struggle for progress, universal fraternity, economic redistribution, love, and altruism. Similarly, Ward (1907) made an acerbic attack against social Darwinism and eugenics, stressing that all individuals, regardless of their social position, are by “nature” “equal in all but privilege” (p. 710). Other authors, however, such as Giddings, argued that efforts should be made to educate and care for some chosen individuals while pushing others, those deemed unfit, over the cliff of ruin, following Nietzsche’s advice, as this would mean an enormous saving of time and money (Banister, 1979, p. 178).

From Sumner’s theoretical principles, which we emphasize, we can deduce his position on war and physical violence. In the Rousseauian manner, Sumner (1919a) considered that pre-modern societies were basically peaceful. Thus, the pre-modern individual was a “peaceful animal.” In his view, although “we cannot postulate a warlike character or a habit of fighting as a universal or even characteristic trait of primitive man” (Sumner, 1919f, p. 7), once the in-group and out-group dynamics were established, violence became frequent, and disputes, confrontations, and wars became much bloodier and more vicious. Similar to what we stated at the beginning of this article, Sumner believed that wars and physical violence had increased in modernity and suggested that in the 20th century, violence would unfold in a way that humanity had never seen before. For Sumner (1919f, p. 10), the in-group members become allies and partners due to shared interests while confronting individuals and groups outside the in-group.

Malesevic (2010) stressed that Sumner interprets war from the metaphor of competition of life: “In his view it is ‘the competition of life’ that ‘makes war’” (p. 42), so that “the struggle for existence which arises from the individual’s instinct for survival” (p. 42), is distinguished from the “competition of life” (p. 42), which is a “group phenomenon” (p. 42) that separates an “us” from a “them.” Individuals struggle individually for existence and collaborate with each other when they are part of an “us” that competes with other groups. Individual struggle and group competition describe a social order marked by rivalry, the use of force, and domination over the weaknesses of others, whether individuals or groups.

While Spencer (1885) defended himself from his critics by making it clear that for him, any kind of aggression is hateful (p. 514), Sumner argued that without competition and struggle, there would never have been progress or modernity. For Spencer, modern and industrial competition pacified societies once the military phase was overcome and predatory practices were replaced by cooperation and agreements (Hawkins, 1995, p. 52). On the other hand, Sumner believes that competition brings violence and war (competition causes war), and war and violence have brought modernity, progress, and the possibility of free competition. During periods of peace, natural selection operates since there is freedom. However, if there is “social prejudice, monopoly, privilege, orthodoxy, tradition, popular delusion, or any other restrain on liberty, selection does not occur” (Summer, 1919f, p. 32).

Moreover, when there is war, “imperfect selection” operates (Sumner, 1919f, p. 32). Thus, selection occurs when there is peace and freedom and when there is war. If there is peace but not freedom, natural selection stops. War and peace-freedom are thus, in his scheme, the fundamental mechanisms that allow natural selection, which is a mechanism not designed by men and presupposes the pure realization of the human to develop. This reasoning clearly articulates the association between competition and war, between the struggle for life and violence. Competition, then, does not come to end violence or to pacify societies, as ideal as this may be, given that there is no violence and natural selection is allowed to take its course, but competition, struggle, violence, and war are confused until they generate development and progress, and allow the development of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Sumner (1919f) writes:

If it had been possible for men to sit still in peace without civilization, they never would have achieved civilization; it is the iron spur of the nature-process which has forced them on, and one form of the nature-process has been the attack of some men upon others who were weaker than they. (p. 34)

Just as eugenic programs aspired to a future non-intervention to be achieved through extermination or sterilization, the ideal of natural selection aspired to a justified future non-intervention (to peace-freedom) needed in certain scenarios in war and the extermination of other human groups. Here, the exterminist desire, under certain conditions, is combined with the acceptance of exterminism in phylogenetic terms.

Hierarchy and legitimized inequality

Although the concepts of competition and struggle, violence and war, survival of the fittest and survival of the unfit, strength and weakness, civilization, and capital already provide several possible combinations that help us understand the social aspect from the 19th century to the present day, we must add yet another set of concepts that are practically derived from the combinations of the previous ones. These are hierarchy and the acceptance and legitimization of inequality.

The categorization of individuals is closely related to their immediate hierarchization according to the categorizer’s criterion. We have witnessed numerous variations of this process over the last two hundred years. The content of the classification is, of course, variable, as are the categorizers and the categorized, and so are the reasons for accepting the classification.

Bataille’s (1979) classic explanation of fascism allows us to come closer to understanding this problem. For fascists, in this fierce struggle that life entails, authority is legitimized by the personal qualities of those who occupy the spaces of privilege. They represent, as Bataille (1979) puts it, the “heterogeneity” as opposed to the “homogeneity” of everyday life and the “homogeneity” of those who lack the specific qualities that allow them to occupy those particular positions and dominate others. Crucial here, naturally, is the categorization of human beings into distinct, classifiable, hierarchical groups. Once fraternity is eliminated, contempt and hatred appear, as well as the initial reaction to others, given that it is considered harmful or irrational (or even paradoxically unjust). As Paxton (1998) explained, the group itself, which is seen as a victim, is legitimized to carry out any act against the other groups, even, as Zizek (2008) suggests, to let itself be carried away by that “surplus-obedience” (pp. 68) from the surplus-enjoyment.

Based on scientific authority and the perception of certain people as inferior and even dangerous to the human species, eugenic programs were put into practice and have continued, in some places, until very recently. As Arendt (2006) pointed out, the eugenics practiced in Nazi Germany paved the way for the Final Solution. However, eugenics had an earlier development, which began to materialize in social Darwinism (Mann, 2005, p. 180; Banister, 1979, pp. 164) and was refined thanks to the intervention of doctors, intellectuals, and politicians who understood that the survival of the fittest depended not only on not helping or intervening so that certain groups (poor people, people with various disabilities, ethnic minorities, etc.) would become extinct but considered that it was necessary to ensure that these people could not reproduce.

It is, of course, a historical error to believe that the eugenics program was exclusively associated with Nazism since eugenic laws and practices are known to have preceded Nazism and survived it in various places. According to Wittman (2004), the first laws enshrining this practice were enacted in the United States, specifically in Indiana in 1907. The precedents for these laws can be traced to the immigration laws of the United States of America in the 1880s (Wittman, 2004, p. 16).

It should be remembered that the American Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was created in 1904, the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905, and the British Eugenics Society in 1907 (Wittman, 2004, p. 17). In fact, an estimated 60,000 people were sterilized in the United States prior to the outbreak of World War II (Reilly, 2015). Although the eugenics movement was international, it could almost be said that it had to be international by definition, and it can be understood fundamentally as a question of social class (of international elites) with a strong racial component. It also involved a nationalist logic explained in the name of the nation’s health and the possibility of a struggle among nations as a form of struggle for life (Bruneteau, 2009, pp. 50-62).

Nonetheless, the hierarchization of individuals and the acceptance of inequality transcends the question of eugenics, which would come to be something like its maximum expression. The defense of the hierarchical organization of the social aspect was openly defended by Sumner (1919e), for whom the industrial regime required “captains of industry.” In his view, the workers’ success depended on their preparation and discipline, essentially on the combination of effort and self-denial. Inequality, here, is conceived as a natural consequence of a type of competition: industrial competition. The captains of industry are those who have the skills required to succeed in this competition, leading to a “natural monopoly” (Sumner, 1919e, p. 200).

Inequality, in Sumner (1919a), results naturally from free competition, which is understood as the “definition of justice” (Sumner, p. 192). Free competition is justice; therefore, the inequality caused by free competition is natural and just. Inequality is a sign of freedom, of the absence of state intervention. Sumner’s (1919c) primary indicator of peace-freedom is inequality. In his view, redistribution, empathy, and mutual support are unjust because they reverse “the distribution of rewards and punishments between those who have done their duty and those who have not” (p. 258). Individuals at the bottom of the social structure deserve, in Sumner’s (1919e) formulation, their fate, whereas the accumulation of capital and wealth in a few hands is not only a natural process but also a just one (pp. 199-208).

In his view, democracy should remain confined to the political arena and should not be introduced into the economic system under any circumstances (Sumner, 1919e, pp. 204-208). In his model, industrial and commercial wars have a similar consideration to political wars. Although it is “an inconvenience; it is doubtful if it is an evil” (Sumner, 1919d, p. 234), since, like war and political violence, when the peace-freedom scenario does not exist, it solves “questions which can never be solved in any other way” (Sumner, 1919d, p. 236), and it is “a sign of vigor in society” (Sumner, 1919d, p. 243).

In Sumner’s general formulation, commercial and military wars, eugenics, competition, and inequality go hand in hand. His highly stratified understanding of society also included a moral dimension. Beyond the elites and the working class, Sumner (1919b) posits the opposition between a category of individual, which included the poor, the undisciplined, and the beggar, and another category of individual, which was the taxpayer, the idealized worker, the individual who “would use his liberty without abusing it” (p. 253), the individual who would “trouble nobody at all” (p. 253). In short, the individual to which everyone should aspire to be: the “forgotten man” and the “forgotten woman” (Sumner, 1919c). It is not difficult to find a correspondence between these forgotten men and women and the construct of the individual to which numerous and diverse political elites around the world have appealed throughout the 20th century and up to the present day.

The competition and the game of the struggle for life and existence were to be directed by elites. It was not and never has been, a matter of eliminating all restrictions and allowing natural selection to operate. Eugenics and exterminism were projects of intellectual, political, and medical elites to be implemented over others. In his critique of Spencer, Laveleye (1885) overlooked the importance of these elites directing the process: “If it be really advisable that the law of the ‘survival of the fittest’ should be established among us, the first step to be taken would be the abolition of all laws which punish theft and murder” (p. 503). Regardless of the ideal aspirations, the conception of the project generated, in reality, the creation of laws that allowed murder and theft to some. It was, and is, simple brutality.

The ontology of death

As we have seen, the acceptance of competition can be understood as a softened form of conflict through the displacement of violence to the economic game. However, it can also be understood/interpreted from the point of view of the inevitable struggle for survival or dominance and power, which would combine economic competition and the resolution of some conflicts in a physically non-violent way with the explicit physical violence of military wars. We have seen how one of the fundamental lines that ultimately leads to violence is the 19th-century exaltation of competition and rivalry, both framed by a typically modern biologicist idea accompanied by the impression of progress.

A notion of inevitability supports these concepts. The competition, the rivalry, the confrontation of all against all is inevitable. Several approaches are based on this notion of the inevitability of conflict. Let us focus, briefly, our attention on de Maistre. As Berlin (1965) noted, de Maistre understood nature to be an “enormous slaughterhouse” (p. 5) in whose vault reigned the human being (who is seen as irrational, as an animal, as an ape, or a tiger), murder, and death. Very significantly, Dessaint (1921) described de Maistre as a Darwinist before Darwin. Indeed, for Berlin (1965), de Maistre is a “proto-Fascist” (p. 23). Thus, rather than a reactionary watching his world crumble, he is an “ultra-modern” thinker (Berlin, 2013, p. 100) anticipating the future.

The key idea at the heart of de Maistre’s thinking is precisely that “war is the terrible and eternal law of the world” (Berlin, 1965, p. 11). Violence is also legitimized as a way of avoiding violence. In this way, de Maistre (1831) justifies counterrevolutionary violence and enters into the game of defending and criticizing violence and counterviolence, as Sorel (2016) will also do when he establishes his classic distinction between bourgeois “force” and revolutionary “violence.”

This is also how de Maistre (1822) justifies the Spanish Inquisition: as human beings tend to be irrational murderers, an elite of rulers must impose a strong and authoritarian regime based on mystery and irrationality and must impose order through authoritarian violence. According to de Maistre, violence can only be prevented and confronted by violence, and the Inquisition served to guarantee “average happiness,” which is the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number of generations (de Maistre, 1822, p. 88), given that it was able to prevent religious wars and avoid the destruction of Catholicism (de Maistre, 1822, pp. 89-157). In my opinion, this is the main idea that de Maistre wants to convey: it is necessary to fight violence with violence. In fact, his Lettres a un gentilhomme russe sur l’inquisition espagnole have a circular structure. It begins with this sentence and ends practically with the repetition of it (de Maistre, 1822, pp. 8-160).

Thus, the Inquisition becomes a force for peace (Berlin, 1965, p. 14). The repression and horror of the burnings become the way to guarantee national stability. If counterrevolution is justified by revolutionary excesses, then the Inquisition is justified; and here we go a step further, no doubt, due to potential future conflicts. It is, ultimately, the logic of preventive war against a hypothetical enemy that will use violent means to destroy the way of life based on order and hierarchy. As Berlin (2013) has emphasized, for de Maistre, the enemies, the others, those who must be eliminated are “the sect” (p. 121), and they are all those who threaten to impede or subvert the Christian order: Jews, Protestants, atheists, scientists, enlightened philosophers, journalists, democrats, etc. Moreover, in addition to the sect, there are those on a lower rung, the other non-Europeans, the inhabitants of other latitudes, who are basically, for de Maistre, “subhumans,” a failed experiment of God.

Wollstonecraft (2014) noted, “that it may be delivered as an axiom, that those who can see pain, unmoved, will soon learn to inflict it” (p. 203). Wollstonecraft spoke of the “habitual cruelty” (p. 203) inflicted on women, children, and servants by males socialized in violence. The societies described by Spencer, Sumner, and de Maistre are undoubtedly based on the Wollstonecraftian habitual cruelty, and, in the latter case, such cruelty is presented as inevitable and necessary. It is difficult to imagine a more dystopian scenario than that of societies in which individuals are socialized in violence, legitimize it, and consider the inequalities that exist within it to be legitimate; societies in which “the others,” conceived from an “immunological” logic that seeks “to distinguish clearly between inside and outside, friend and foe, self and other” (Han, 2015, p. 1), are exterminated. Thus, the fundamental problem of modern societies is that they point to a dystopian future, and they are built on a cruel and barbaric past based precisely on exterminist violence.

Complicity and collective denial

We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.

—K. Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

The denial of death, understood as a mechanism of repression of the double natural problematic (symbolic and corporeal) of human beings and the falsification of the true human condition (Becker, 2008, p. 55), becomes more urgent and tangible when it is transferred to extermination. What is now being denied is the murder of others. According to Girard (2016), unanimous violence must be forgotten in order to guarantee the possibility of peace and social order. In his view, if violence were visible, the cycle of revenge and reciprocal violence would ultimately destroy society. If, as Garfinkel (2006) argued, individuals make daily efforts to maintain social order and seek to reduce anxiety and insecurity (Turner, 1988, pp. 74-75; 2007) in order to carry out their everyday activities, it seems evident that the visibility of violence or even the exploration of its foundations threatens their “ontological security” (Giddens, 2003).

In his reflection on the problematic consequences generated by bureaucracy in contemporary societies, Graeber (2015) includes the demand for commitment, the “complicity” (p. 27), and the bureaucracy itself, to the extent of denying one’s own lived and experienced reality. According to Graeber, an institutional-bureaucratic claim indicates complicity with bureaucracy itself regardless of what one sees with one’s own eyes. This has potentially devastating consequences. The problem is compounded when these local bureaucratic complicities extend throughout society.

For Graeber (2015), the concept of meritocracy permeates modern societies and generates complicities that prevent individuals from paying attention to what they see, distancing them from their own experience and ultimately creating difficulties for the critique of society. If we continue with Graeber’s arguments and Sassen’s (2015) thesis, which we discussed above, we could understand that bureaucratized systems, led by technocrats who present political decisions as if they were technical and who complexify tools and products to the point of hollowness, not only serve as a justification for inequality, but end up producing complicity, conformity, and brutality and, above all, the feeling that those who have problems—are, for example, excluded or expelled—deserve it.

From a micro-sociological perspective, Zerubavel (2006) emphasized how social spaces in which the presence of an elephant in the room is systematically denied create a critical detachment between what is lived and what is expressed, which generates a high level of alienation. Therefore, there are social situations in which there is a collective denial that imposes the law of silence on certain issues that are, however, known to all, open secrets. All individuals who experience situations with elephants in the room know what they should not know. Newcomers to situations with elephants in the room experience a loss of touch with reality (the tension between what is experienced internally and what is publicly acknowledged). Individuals forced to deny and silence what they experience internally are subjected to a demanding emotional control that results in fatigue and tension (the feeling of walking through a minefield). Loneliness becomes widespread (because communication is clouded), and, above all, there is a fundamental risk: accepting the silence that opens the door to normalizing situations that can be problematic.

This experience also reinforces the commitment to the institution since one is systematically required to even lie (to oneself or others) for it. Arendt (2006) noted that, in Nazi Germany, self-deception became “a moral prerequisite for survival” (p. 52). The denial of death and violence, the systemic demands for compromise and complicity thus open the door, as Graeber, Zerubavel, and Arendt argue, to the alienation of the individual from the lived and experienced reality and ultimately to the destruction of the social bond. Both elements are potentially dangerous and can contribute to opening the way to exterminist violence.

To conclude: desire, acceptance, and will to exterminate

To be aware of being unhappy presupposes that something else is possible, a different condition from the unhappy one.

—H. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World.

This article argues that several elements (a combination of discourses and practices) cause/stimulate the desire, acceptance, and will to exterminate. They are based on some general dynamics of elimination and exclusion of individuals or social groups, which are the reverse of the ideal proposal of inclusion and the construction of egalitarian societies with balance and equilibrium of power, and take various forms: exclusion, expulsion, and extermination. However, we have identified an analytical gradation in order to approach these serious and significant issues more carefully.

Therefore, we have adopted a triad of concepts: desire, acceptance, and will. It is not the same thing to argue that it would be better for a part of society not to exist (desire) than to accept that a part of society is going to disappear or cease to exist, either through the course of history (acceptance) or through the conscious and deliberate actions carried out by another part of society (will), although this is problematic and very worrying in itself. Notwithstanding, this conceptual division is usually blurred in socio-historical terms, and it is not always easy to discern between these positions. In any case, let this approach serve as a typical-ideal scheme.

Without being exhaustive, we have identified some of these elements: competition/legitimization of inequality, hierarchy/acceptance of inequality, ontology of death, and collective complicity/denial. The relations between them are complex and can be articulated as follows: competition generates hierarchy because it legitimizes inequality. Hierarchy, however, overrides free and fair competition. Thus, competition denies itself, but it does so by leaving a remnant of legitimized inequality. The ontology of death claims perpetual peace without conflict, but it causes constant death and rhythmic and recurrent conflicts. The ontology of death becomes mute in each specific case, although it remembers the previous ones. The ontology of death is made possible by denying specific cases to the point of their disappearance.

From all that has been written above, two fundamental theses emerge that point to the possibility of the emergence of simple exterminist brutality and the potential autonomization of violent dynamics.

1)In social scenarios of exclusion/expulsion, competition/legitimization of inequality, hierarchy/acceptance of inequality, the ontology of death, and collective complicity/denial generate desire, acceptance, and, in some cases, the will to exterminate. This scenario produces social environments with legitimized and institutionalized inequality and also, potentially, social environments permeated by exterminist violence.

2)In social scenarios of inclusion, even though we find competition/legitimization of inequality, hierarchy/acceptance of inequality, the ontology of death, and collective complicity/denial, the desire, acceptance, and will to exterminate have more difficulty flourishing. Far from idyllic, this scenario would generate social environments with legitimized and institutionalized inequality, but with certain limits concerning the realization, the “moving in on the act” (Semelin, 2007), of physical exterminist violence.

Thus, the initial and crucial question is situated in the inclusion-exclusion and inclusion-expulsion relations. Nevertheless, this is a complex relation since the dynamics of inclusion can potentially generate exclusion. Who “we” are is sociohistorically constructed, as opposed to who “they” are (ultimately: “they” are those who are not “us”). Inclusion causes exclusion and their interaction, as we have seen, potentially, simple exterminist brutality.

This dynamic also works in reverse, as exclusion (of some “others”) causes inclusion (inward, building an “us”), and once again, we are faced with the potential for simple exterminist brutality. It is exactly the same with expulsion and its relation to inclusion. Inclusion prevents expulsion, while expulsion (of “others”), which already borders on simple exterminist brutality, reinforces inclusion (of those not expelled). We could call these complex relations between inclusion-exclusion/expulsion Sumner’s paradox. As is known, Sumner (1906) created the concept of ethnocentrism, but the revision of his ideas, as we have seen above, manifests an ethnocentric desire, an acceptance, and a eugenic desire; in short, an acceptance of exterminism.

The deactivation of exterminist dynamics requires a complex analysis of the exclusion and expulsion dynamics, as well as a careful analysis of competition, inequality, hierarchy, the ontology of death, denial, and complicities. The purpose of these pages is only to advance the understanding of all these elements and their relations and stimulate further analyses and research (socio-historical and empirical, theoretical-empirical, of conceptual purification, purely theoretical) operating in these coordinates and within this framework.

Conflict of interest

The author declares no conflict of interest with the institution or commercial association.

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Authors notes

Alberto Javier Ribes

Doctor in Sociology (UCM, 2005). Teacher of the Department of Sociology: Theory and Methodology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid-Spain. Contact: ajribes@cps.ucm.es. ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3041-0804. Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=DDwFEB4AAAAJ&hl=en

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