Freud unmasks us as murderous angels—civilization’s hypocrisy hides our primitive psyche, where love and hate entwine, and even our gentlest virtues are born of cruelty.

Sigmund Freud’s Reflections on War and Death from 1915, written just six months after the beginning of World War I, reads like a mirror polished just enough to show the rot beneath our civilization’s cosmetics. He argues that conscience isn’t some sacred moral compass—it’s just “social fear” in a tailored suit. We obey not because we are good, but because we are afraid.

Illusions protect us from pain, but reality smashes them to pieces. Civilization itself, Freud insists, rests on the renunciation of impulse gratification. We are trained to swallow our desires until they ferment into something called “altruism.” Yet behind every polite smile lurks the primitive psyche—indestructible, ambivalent, always both loving and hating the same object.

This is why the most selfless humanitarians can emerge from childhood sadists. Egotism alchemizes into service, cruelty twists into sympathy, but the raw material is the same. Our “character” is less about being good or evil than about how successfully we camouflage the beast within. Civilization calls this transformation progress. Freud calls it hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, in fact, may be civilization’s true foundation. Forced to live emotionally “above our means,” we perform virtue while privately seething with impulses we dare not admit. Freud warns that this strain produces neuroses, but he also suggests hypocrisy might be indispensable—without it, civilization itself could collapse. It’s a bleak paradox: survival through dishonesty.

Freud’s diagnosis, penned by early 20th century gaslight, feels prescient in the glare of the smartphone. Our digital world, one Freud could never have imagined, isn’t an escape from this dynamic but rather its perfection. “Social fear” is now weaponized into an economy of performative virtue. “Liking” a cause is our new, low-cost altruism; canceling a stranger is our new, high-reward sadism. Our digital tribes are built on the same Freudian bedrock: love for the ingroup is defined almost entirely by a shared, ecstatic hatred for the outgroup. This is hypocrisy at hyperspeed.

Also, Freud claims the unconscious does not believe in its own mortality. Every dream we dream betrays this conviction, every sarcastic “the devil take him” masks a death wish. If judged by our unconscious desires, we are all murderers. Even love isn’t exempt. The closest bonds carry hostility and secret rivalries, and a lurking wish for the beloved’s annihilation. What once produced religion and ethics now produces neurosis. Freud’s conclusion is chilling: war may not ever be abolished, because ambivalence is baked into our blood.

Then, there’s death. Freud claims the unconscious doesn’t believe in its own mortality. Every dream we dream betrays this conviction of immortality, every sarcastic “the devil take him” masks a death wish. If judged by our unconscious desires, we’re all murderer, sjust lucky our curses don’t carry the power of primitive magic.

Over a century later, this work still burns hot. Civilization promises progress but breeds hypocrisy. We are murderous angels pretending at sainthood. But this is no longer just a private neurosis. While Freud’s diagnosis was potent in 1915, it’s only in our modern, digitally-connected world that his theory finds its most terrifying expression—proving that hypocrisy is not just civilization’s foundation, but its inevitable, algorithmic endpoint. Still, we keep living, keep dreaming, keep telling stories where heroes die so we don’t have to ourselves pay the ultimate price.