EDUCATION IN CRUELTY. The Mass Psychology of the New Fascism

»*Education for Cruelty* is an important and unsettling book. It shows how cruelty is learned through politics – and how dangerous it is when a society begins to regard it as normal.« - Günter Kaindlstorfer, Deutschlandfunk
Robert Misik demonstrates »How words become weapons, outrage becomes hatred, and hatred becomes entertainment.« - Culture Time 
»Insightful and well worth reading… brilliantly written.« – Süddeutsche Zeitung

In Brecht’s A man is a man In 1926, experiments were carried out to determine whether it was possible to mould people – along with their attitudes – at will. Within a week, the labourer Galy Gay was »re-engineered« into an unfeeling fighting machine for the British colonial army. Less than ten years later, exactly the same thing happened to an entire society in Nazi Germany.

As right-wing populism escalates into right-wing radicalism and ultimately into a new form of fascism, something very similar is unfolding before our very eyes. The incited individual does not just appear out of thin air. They are created. The agitation stokes anger and bitterness, seeks to transform its followers into utterly paranoid individuals, and fuels a cult of brutality and fantasies about all manner of cruelties one might inflict on others. These are formative years of inhumanity.

Robert Misik, Author and journalist

Ilkim Erdost, Head of the Education and Consumer Affairs Division, Vienna, at the Vienna Chamber of Real Estate Agents

Markus Brunner, Social psychologist and sociologist; academic director of the Master’s specialisation in “Social Psychology/Clinical Psychology” at Sigmund Freud Private University (SFU) in Vienna

Eva Zeglovits, Political scientist, social scientist and opinion pollster; Managing Director of the Institute for Empirical Social Research (IFES)

Moderation
Wolfgang Schröder, Professor at the University of Kassel, Director of the Progressive Centre (Berlin) and former State Secretary for Labour and Social Affairs in Brandenburg

Robert Misik:
Education in Cruelty
Suhrkamp Verlag, August 2026, €18.00