On Moral Castration

Herman Wouk wrote in The Caine Mutiny about how extreme fear can lead to “moral castration” in human beings and cause them to fail in their duties or act in ways that are contrary to humanity.

Moral castration. It was an explosive phrase. I’d never heard or read it before. It felt totally original.

I underlined the passage and set the book down. I started thinking about it while lounging on the back deck in 90-degree heat.

Wouk’s use of the phrase was in reference to what happens to sailors on a ship ready to founder in a typhoon. These sailors and their officers suffered a moral castration during the panic and did something wholly immoral in a split second because fear severed their morality.

He also meant it, I think, to describe what happened to German’s citizenry during Hitler’s Third Reich. Hitler injected so much fear (and resentment) into these people that all their morality was sliced away and they had no idea it had happened, let alone the type of procedure. Absent that collective morality, dictatorship, murder, world war and genocide resulted. It didn’t take very long, either.

Moral castration. It pretty much sums up Trump’s effect on millions of Americans. He and his media minions sowed more fear and resentment than Hitler, some of it truly bizarre (Hillary, gay M & M’s and pedophiles operating out of a basement in a pizza Parlor.)

Many Americans are now following him and acting out without any morality whatsoever. It’s gone. And these people will never reclaim it.

I also considered moral castration in relationship to alleviating the homeless crisis. Is there such a castration? What are the extreme fears that have rendered people incapable of acting rapidly or not at all, to address a catastrophic humanitarian crisis? I don’t know where I am going with all of this. But I am thinking about it.