
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"
