Executioners fear the loss of their own emotional responsiveness

Evidence

Executioners varied in their reactions to participating in executions. Some took pride in their emotional toughness: “I take pride that I can do it without falling apart mentally”. Many others expressed concerns that taking human life would turn them into insensitive, uncaring persons. “My biggest concern is that I’ll be there and won’t feel anything. I have a real concern that it wouldn’t concern me any longer to put someone to death”. Evidence that an executioner had already begun to change in the feared direction was especially distressing: “The hardest thing for me is that the first one really affected me and the next two to three didn’t. It affected me that it didn’t affect me”. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2038

Categorization

• CANDY: The line ‘It affected me that it didn’t affect me’ is a haunting, quotable encapsulation of desensitization
• DEEPTHINKING: The meta-fear — being distressed by your own emotional numbness — captures the divided self in moral disengagement more precisely than any abstract formulation.
• XREF: connects to: Torture of prisoners expresses the executioner’s repressed longing for the body he destroys — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 223