When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act
of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A group of
seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old. "It is
always so," my mother said. "You do things together which not one of you
would think of doing alone." ... Wherever one looks in the world of human
organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards.
The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems
to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things
together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.
-- Freeman Dyson, "Weapons and Hope"
