People define the groups to which they belong in abstract terms, making the greatest exertions in killing and dying not to preserve their own lives or to defend families and friends—but for the sake of an idea. Political violence is based on a group’s “transcendent moral conception.”

“What inspires the willingness of human beings to make their greatest exertions, to fight unto death with and for genetic strangers,” a propensity to which “no creatures but humans seem subject?”

 Humans die & kill in the name of transcendent ideals. Across human history, violence is universally claimed by its perpetrators to be a “sublime matter of moral virtue.” Without this claim to virtue, it is difficult to "kill large number of people innocent of direct harm to others.”