Those who identify with the whole as its defenders cannot be guilty

Evidence

Obviously, in the realm of the Happy Consciousness, guilt feeling has no place, and the calculus takes care of conscience. When the whole is at stake, there is no crime except that of rejecting the whole, or not defending it. Crime, guilt, and guilt feeling become a private affair. Freud revealed in the psyche of the individual the crimes of mankind, in the individual case history the history of the whole. This fatal link is successfully suppressed. Those who identify themselves with the whole, who are installed as the leaders and defenders of the whole can make mistakes, but they cannot do wrong—they are not guilty. They may become guilty again when this identification no longer holds, when they are gone. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 357

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s banality of evil and Eichmann’s appeal to bureaucratic duty — the same displacement of individual guilt onto the larger whole. — connects to: Groups are not blamed for crimes of members who share their identity — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 47; Group-level moral disengagement is an emergent property, not a sum of individual exonerations; Ideology exonerates killers but cannot fully suppress residual self-disquiet — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2216 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Groups are not blamed for crimes of members who share their identity #expands (0.85) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 47
• Ideology exonerates killers but cannot fully suppress residual self-disquiet #complicates (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2216
• Group-level moral disengagement is an emergent property, not a sum of individual exonerations #complicates (0.75)