German bureaucrat to the news that he will no longer be managing the logistics of railroad cars filled with merchandise bound for market. Starting tomorrow his job will be the same with the minor exception of the cargo, which will now be human beings bound for torture and death. He goes home, has dinner with his family, helps his children with their homework, makes love with his wife, and goes back to work the next day to carry out his slightly revised duties. What is missing from this picture? I would suggest that introspection is missing. If this man had a habit of introspection, whether through prayer, meditation, contemplation, or psychotherapy, it is hard to imagine that he would go to work the next morning believing that his participation in genocide would not be in violation of some intrinsic moral principle. (For research supporting this rather broad generalization, see May, [1987].) Without such introspection, he is at the mercy of external authority, in this case the German state, which clearly reports to him no moral conflict in his compliance. In fact, quite the opposite is the case.
I am not suggested that a brief course of psychotherapy or meditation instruction would have stopped a German bureaucrat in his or her tracks in the weeks before genocide became the assignment of the day. The development of moral awareness that I am suggesting such introspective practices might have fostered would have to begin much earlier. The popular TV show, “The Sopranos,” makes an attempt to examine what might happen when a person whose moral development has arrested at an early age is exposed to psychotherapy as a adult. The result is certainly not a rapid compensation for earlier deficiencies in such