Who Condemned Us to Trauma?

Older peoples—and to no lesser extent, many younger ones—often represent communities founded on trauma. They traumatize their offspring so profoundly and so impressively—through blades that cut the flesh, as well as through memories of exalted humiliations and neurotic mandates for revenge—that these offspring are left with little choice but to move in the direction set by these identity-forming wounds.

Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947) is one of the greatest living German philosophers, the author of the monumental three-volume work Spheres, which is one of the great attempts to explain the movements and properties of the human mind.