Colonial settings dissolved the social restraints that delayed criminal refinement in Europe

Evidence

The perfect gentleman and the perfect scoundrel came to know each other well in the “great wild jungle without law,” and they found themselves “well-matched in their enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in different disguises.” … This refinement, the very contrast between the brutality of the crime and the manner of carrying it out, becomes the bridge of deep understanding between himself and the perfect gentleman. But what, after all, took decades to achieve in Europe, because of the delaying effect of social ethical values, exploded with the suddenness of a short circuit in the phantom world of colonial adventure. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 494

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the ‘short circuit’ of the colonies as a mechanism for collapsing moral evolution — how frontier conditions accelerate what metropolitan society slows.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the sacrifice article’s theme of violence legitimized outside ‘civilized’ moral constraint.