Epidemic of suicidal obedience

Epidemic of suicidal obedience is Victoria McCandless’s attempt to explain how men who were not individually bloodthirsty or stupid could collectively submit to a war that killed and maimed millions. The phrase names more than military obedience: it describes a surrender of self-respect so deep that people could treat their bodies and minds as expendable instruments. Her diagnosis turns from the conduct of soldiers to the conditions that make such obedience seem right—and finally to the painful possibility that she herself failed to prevent it.

The Meaning of the Expression

McCandless considers why the world’s richest and most industrialized nations, which had called themselves the most civilized, fought the largest and cruellest war in history. The puzzle is not simply that governments ordered men to fight, but that millions obeyed orders to kill and be killed on a suicidal scale. Drawing on Tolstoy’s account of the French invasion of Russia under Napoleon, she treats mass belligerence as an epidemic of insanity: a collective affliction that can consume people even when conquest would bring their country no real benefit.

The language of an epidemic makes obedience a condition that spreads through society rather than an isolated defect in individual soldiers. McCandless also calls it an “epidemic of self-abasement” and connects it to an “epidemic of belligerence.” These expressions give the same crisis two aspects: people abase themselves by accepting that their lives have little worth, and that self-abasement enables them to participate in organized violence. Because she is a doctor, she approaches the analogy as a problem of causes. If an epidemic has causes, she reasons, those causes may be discovered and the epidemic prevented.

A Diagnosis That Crosses Class Lines

McCandless initially considers overcrowding as a possible condition behind belligerence. People who live and work in crowded quarters, she observes, are vulnerable to epidemics; but at least a quarter of those who fought and died in the First World War were prosperous and lived in spacious homes. The officers and those who ordered the carnage came almost entirely from this class. The war’s obedient machinery, in her account, therefore cannot be explained by poverty or crowding alone.

She places the war in a longer history of national and commercial rivalry, including Britain’s wars with France, Spain, Holland and the United States. Those rivalries help explain the origins of conflict, but do not answer her central question: why did individual men accept their governments’ demand that they kill and be killed? Her proposed explanation shifts from public causes to private formation. Bad mothering and fathering, she suggests, can leave people with a heartfelt belief that their lives are valueless—a belief that makes self-sacrifice to the war machine possible.

The Body as a Machine

McCandless makes the abstract diagnosis concrete through the military medical inspection. She asks what a man who respected his body could bear in queuing naked among other men while a clothed man examined their genitals, and what a man who respected his mind could bear in making money by doing such work. She interprets the inspection as a kind of baptism into a religion of man-killing: it initiates the soldier into a system that prizes him in proportion to his willingness to treat his body as an insensitive machine.

The metaphor then removes even the last claim of personal ownership. The soldier is not merely made to regard his body as a machine, but as a machine steered by remote controllers. McCandless’s two youngest sons willingly became such instruments; their bodies were mangled and crushed into mud. Her eldest son made his mind, rather than his body, part of the war machine. She comes to regard him as a victim of self-disrespect too. The distinction between bodily and intellectual participation does not exempt either kind of service from her diagnosis: obedience can commandeer different parts of a person while depending on the same diminished sense of self.

The Family as a Test of the Theory

The account becomes most difficult when McCandless applies her explanation to her own family. For the first ten years of their lives, her three sons lived in a clean, spacious home and were shaped by loving, educated, adventurous parents. She was a radical Socialist; her husband was a Liberal. Their sons were preparing for peaceful professional work as Scottish public servants, using humane modern ideas to address the need for good, clean homes and useful, fairly paid work. Yet when war was declared, all three immediately behaved, in her view, like the sons of an English fox-hunting Tory, despite knowing that she considered their conduct wicked.

This contradiction prevents her from treating the epidemic as a simple consequence of bad surroundings or neglect. She rejects an explanation based on the inherent depravity of human nature or of men, and does not blame the militaristic histories taught at school, since she believes that teaching was countered at home. Instead, she turns the inquiry on herself. During the first six or seven years of their lives, she had both the means and the loving support to shape them, yet believes she did not give them enough self-respect to resist the war’s epidemic of self-abasement.

An Unresolved Search for Causes

The expression thus carries both a social diagnosis and a personal accusation. It exposes a system in which inspection, command and war reduce people to bodies and minds directed from elsewhere; at the same time, it asks how the conviction that makes this reduction bearable is formed. McCandless’s family history sharpens rather than settles the question: a spacious, loving and politically humane home did not keep her sons from entering the war machine.

She says that she has found the root of the illness in herself, but the passage ends by postponing what that discovery is. The promise of an explanation is therefore part of the expression’s force. “Epidemic of suicidal obedience” names an outcome whose causes must be traced through intimate upbringing as well as national and commercial power, while leaving the reader at the threshold of McCandless’s further account.