The Price of Abstraction: Why Leaders Speak of the Dead Without Grief

There is a particular kind of sentence that war produces, and once you notice it, you cannot unhear it. A press secretary steps to a podium, a general appears on a Sunday morning panel, a head of state delivers a carefully worded address, and somewhere in the carefully managed language, the dead are acknowledged briefly as a cost, described as regrettable, necessary, the price of freedom or security or strategic interest. Then the conversation moves on, and no one in the room flinches. We have, somewhere along the way, agreed to accept this as a normal form of communication. The question worth asking is how we got here, and what it reveals about the kind of culture we have become.

Part of the answer begins in the psychology of power itself. Carl Jung identified what he called “psychic inflation,”¹ a condition he described as an “extension of the personality beyond individual limits,”² a state in which a person “fills a space which normally he cannot fill.”³ What Jung is pointing to is not mere arrogance. He is identifying something more structurally dangerous: the leader stops experiencing themself as one mortal among others and begins to inhabit something larger, a cause, a nation, a historical mission. His most telling illustration is the person who so thoroughly identifies with a professional office or title that the role swallows the human being entire. The motto of such a person, Jung writes, is “L’état c’est moi.”⁴ I find this analysis compelling precisely because it does not require us to assume that leaders who speak casually of the dead are privately cruel. Many of them are not. But the persona of command is genuinely dissociating, and once you have identified your ego with a mission larger than any individual life, including your own, you have already developed the internal architecture that makes abstracting the dead not only possible but, in a distorted way, principled. The soldier becomes “our forces.” The civilian becomes “collateral.” The dead become a number in a briefing. And the number, unlike the face, does not disturb your sleep or interrupt your planning.

Hannah Arendt gave us a second and equally important piece of this puzzle. Watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, she was struck not by the monster she expected to encounter but by the administrator. Her conclusion was disturbing precisely because it was so counterintuitive. Evil, she argued, is not deep. It does not have a demonic dimension. Instead it can “spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth”⁵ because, at its root, “Evil comes from a failure to think.”⁶ Eichmann had not become a moral monster. He had simply stopped asking moral questions altogether, replacing them with procedural ones. The question he trained himself to ask was not “what are we doing to these people?” but “are we meeting the operational requirements?”

Arendt’s analysis deserves to be taken seriously well beyond the extreme case she was examining. While Eichmann’s situation was historically singular, the mechanism she identified is not. Any sufficiently large institution, whether military, governmental, or corporate, trains its participants to evaluate decisions in terms of process and outcome rather than in terms of the particular human beings affected. The language follows the logic. You cannot speak with genuine feeling about what you have trained yourself not to feel. And when an entire culture’s leadership class is formed inside institutions that reward precisely this kind of affective detachment, the press conference language we opened with becomes not an aberration but an entirely predictable result.

The neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has spent decades arguing that Western culture has undergone a slow but profound shift in the kind of attention it brings to the world. His account of the brain’s two hemispheres is not the tired pop-psychology version of rational versus emotional. What he is describing is a difference in the fundamental orientation each hemisphere takes toward reality. The right hemisphere sees things as they actually are, which means they are “constantly new for it,”⁷ and cannot be reduced to fixed categories. The left hemisphere, by contrast, achieves its characteristic “certainty of knowledge”⁸ precisely by learning to “fix things and isolate them.”⁹ What is fixed and isolated can be managed, quantified, and traded. What remains living and particular resists all three.

McGilchrist traces this left-hemisphere dominance deep into the history of Western philosophy, noting that from Plato onward, the intellectual tradition has prized the abstract, the universal, and the categorically certain over the embodied, the particular, and the genuinely encountered. When that tradition produces the leaders and institutions that govern our public life, the consequences are entirely consistent. The person at the podium is not suppressing grief. They have been formed inside a cognitive and institutional culture that long ago ceased to regard the particular face as the proper object of serious attention.

The cultural normalization of this language did not happen overnight, and it has a history that deserves to be traced honestly. The first major chapter of that history was written in the trenches of the First World War. John Keegan’s authoritative account opens with a judgment that has never lost its force: the First World War was, he writes, “a tragic and unnecessary conflict”¹⁰ whose consequences “destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent”¹¹ and left a legacy of rancor so intense that the Second World War cannot be understood without reference to it. What Keegan’s framing illuminates is that the industrialization of death in 1914–1918 did not simply kill ten million people. It killed the emotional and cultural frameworks that might have held that loss. When the scale of death exceeds the human capacity for grief, a culture develops protective mechanisms: euphemism, abstraction, the language of sacrifice and strategic necessity. Those mechanisms did not disappear when the guns fell silent. They became the grammar of public discourse about war, and every generation since has inherited them.

The Cold War deepened and formalized this inheritance in ways that are still shaping us. Fred Kaplan’s account of the RAND Corporation strategists of the 1950s describes a group of “rational analysts”¹² who set out to “impose a rational order”¹³ on nuclear war, inventing in the process a “whole new language and vocabulary”¹⁴ that conditioned an entire generation of political and military leaders to think about mass destruction as a systems and game-theory problem.

Their characteristic phrase, “thinking about the unthinkable,”¹⁵ eventually percolated so thoroughly through the corridors of power that their assumptions were, in Kaplan’s words, “worshiped as gospel truth.”¹⁶ The language was not cynical. It was the sincere product of a particular intellectual formation. But that formation required, as its operating condition, the sustained capacity to discuss the deaths of hundreds of millions of people without allowing that reality to land as anything other than a variable in a deterrence model.

The final and perhaps most pervasive layer of this problem is the one we inhabit so completely that it becomes difficult to see. The mediation of experience through screens has fundamentally altered the way we process the suffering of others. Death, when it arrives on a phone or a television, comes already packaged, already framed, and already on its way to the next story. The algorithm is not interested in grief. It is interested in engagement, and sustained, embodied grief is not particularly engaging on a platform designed for rapid consumption.

Neil Postman argued that every medium of communication carries within it a hidden epistemological framework, that the form shapes not only what we know but how we are capable of knowing it.¹⁷ Applied to the question before us, the implication is sobering. We have built a media environment that is structurally hostile to the kind of sustained moral attention that genuine grief requires. The emotional metabolism of grief takes time, presence, and the willingness to let a particular loss fully land. Contemporary media is organized against all three of those conditions simultaneously. We have built a world in which death arrives faster than we can feel it, and the failure to feel it has become so universal that it no longer registers as a failure at all.

Taken together, these forces, the psychological inflation Jung identified, the bureaucratic replacement of moral imagination Arendt diagnosed, the left-hemisphere dominance of institutional culture that McGilchrist mapped, the industrialization of death that Keegan traced, the rationalization of mass destruction that Kaplan documented, and the mediation of experience through screens that Postman anticipated, have produced a cultural environment in which a leader can speak of casualties the way an accountant speaks of a quarterly loss, and the rest of us watch and nod and move on without registering that something significant has gone wrong.

The acceptance is the most troubling part. It is one thing for leaders to develop this kind of language. It is another for a culture to have developed so little resistance to it that the language barely registers as remarkable anymore. We have not simply inherited this indifference passively. We have, through a long series of institutional choices about what to reward, what to promote, and what to let pass without protest, actively constructed it together.

The antidote, if there is one, is not primarily political in the first instance. It is attentional. It begins with the refusal to let abstraction stand unchallenged, with the insistence on naming names, on asking who specifically died and where they lived and who is now without them. Not because that changes a policy immediately, but because a culture that has lost the habit of moral presence to the particular has lost something that is very difficult to recover once it has gone quiet.

The dead deserve more than a line in a briefing. And so, for that matter, do we.

Endnotes

¹ C.G. Jung, “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious,” in Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Collected Works vol. 7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 142.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid., p. 143. Jung’s precise summary is L’état c’est moi, the Bourbon motto, offered as the characteristic self-understanding of the person inflated by identification with an institutional role.

⁵ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 15.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), “Certainty” section. McGilchrist’s point is that the right hemisphere, because it remains open to things as they actually are, cannot accumulate the fixed databank of categorical knowledge that the left hemisphere builds precisely by abstracting from reality.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 3.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 3.

¹² Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 10.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 11.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), pp. 8–10.

Written by Mark J. Chironna, PhD.

Dr. Mark Chironna is a public scholar, executive and personal coach, and thought leader with five decades of experience in leadership development, cultural analysis, and future-focused strategies. With advanced degrees in Psychology, Applied Semiotics and Futures Studies, and Theology, he brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to helping individuals and organizations navigate complexity, unlock potential, and craft innovative solutions.

As a Board Certified Coach with over 30,000 hours of experience, he empowers leaders and teams to thrive through resilience, foresight, and actionable strategies. Passionate about human flourishing, he integrates psychological insight and cultural trends to inspire growth and transformation.

WEBSITE::  www.markchironna.com

• Next