Savage man is a nonhuman animal, lacking instinctual repression, while primitive man is human infant, lacking individuation and rationality.
'Then what is the civilized man?'
Through this lens, the brutal murders and public torching of four American civilians by a Fallujan mob in March 2004 converge with the torture scenes orchestrated by American troops in Abu Ghraib revealed a month later. Both could be read as a decline of individual deliberation, conscience, and restraint in the context of morally depraved group enthusiasms. Yet this convergence still permits a divergent assessment of the two peoples from which the acts emerged - such that President Bush could declare that the Fallujan incident or Nicholas Berg's decapitation confirmed "the true nature of the enemy" while insisting that the torture at Abu Ghraib did not express the "nature of the men and women who serve our country".
'How does this happen?'
Freud says that through the group idealization of a loved object, overvaluation of the object occurs. Brown clarifies his position by stating that idealization is essentially narcissistic projections of the group-self, inhibiting the rationalizing individual instinct. It is this over-idealization by group-think which feeds back unto itself, growing until it overtakes the ego ideal of the individual altogether: "the ego [of the individual] becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the 'object' more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence”.
