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. Freeman Dyson
Weapons and Hope