For a revolutionary, the world is worthless and merits annihilation. Someone who thinks so must loathe life. “There is no greater joy, there is no better music than a crushing sound of smashed bones and lives,” a Bolshevik poet echoed in a hymn to obliteration. The Nazis “were destroyers,” argued psychologist Erich Fromm. “They hated not only their enemies, they hated life itself.” A zeal for annihilation is at the core of extremism, no matter what the orientation. Remarkably, emotional rejection of the world almost always precedes the destroyers’ ideological justification of a plan for its ruin.
