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Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination
Examines the psychology of hatred and aggression, by which one's fears and inadequacies are projected onto others, dehumanizing them into enemies and legitimizing violence
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
Sam Keen
69 books148 followersSam Keen was an American author, professor, and philosopher who is best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, wonder, religion, and being a male in contemporary society. He co-produced Faces of the Enemy, an award-winning PBS documentary; was the subject of a Bill Moyers' television special in the early 1990s; and for 20 years served as a contributing editor at Psychology Today magazine. He was also featured in the 2003 documentary Flight from Death.
Keen completed his undergraduate studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and later completed graduate degrees at Harvard University and Princeton University.
Keen was married to Patricia de Jong, who was a former senior minister of First Congregational Church of Berkeley, United Church of Christ, in Berkeley, California.
Keen completed his undergraduate studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and later completed graduate degrees at Harvard University and Princeton University.
Keen was married to Patricia de Jong, who was a former senior minister of First Congregational Church of Berkeley, United Church of Christ, in Berkeley, California.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 8, 2017
This is the first book I bought myself that opened my eyes to duplicity in human interactions. It was comforting because it confirmed my suspicions that humans liked to manipulate other beings but particularly their own kind. It also demonstrated the content with war propaganda which I found interesting because usually only (what I considered,) blatant and brief selected examples were demonstrated in public schools.
Anyway, it's a terrific book. I read it in the 80s. Then found it in a move in the 90s and reread it. Then I gave it to my brother, forgot that I did and forgot it's title. Just saw it in his collection and rejoiced. Maybe I'll read it again.
Anyway, it's a terrific book. I read it in the 80s. Then found it in a move in the 90s and reread it. Then I gave it to my brother, forgot that I did and forgot it's title. Just saw it in his collection and rejoiced. Maybe I'll read it again.
June 25, 2008
a great collection of war propaganda art. just avoid the hysterically bad text. the book is full of the sort of ludicrous errors unique to pacifists.
was appalled to find it was intended for use in the classroom. the teacher who exposes kids to such poorly researched and delusional thinking should be ashamed.
was appalled to find it was intended for use in the classroom. the teacher who exposes kids to such poorly researched and delusional thinking should be ashamed.
January 6, 2009
"Generation after generation, we find excuses to hate dehumanize each other, and we always justify ourselves with the most mature-sounding political rhetoric."
"The hostile imagination begins with a simple but crippling assumption: what is strange or unknown is dangerous and intends evil."
"Paranoids begin with imagined enemies and end up with real ones as the cycle of reaction turns into a complex historical conflict."
"As a rule, human beings do not kill other human beings. Before we enter into warfare or genocide, we first dehumaize those we mean to 'eliminate.'...'The' enemy is always singular, a limbolike category, to which we may assign any threat about which we do not wish to think clearly...It is not a person we kill, but an idea."
"The most terrible of all moral paradoxes, the Gordian knot that must be unraveled if history is to continue, is that we create evil out of our highest ideals and most noble aspirations. We so need to be heroic, to be on the side of God, to eliminate evil, to clean up the world, to be victorius over death, that we visit destruction and death on all who stand in the way of our heroic historical destiny. We scapegoat and create absolute enemies, not because we are intrinsically cruel, but because focusing our anger on an outside target, striking at strangers, brings our tribe or nation together and allows us to be a part of a close and loving in-group. We create surplus evil because we need to belong."
"It should not escape our notice that the new apolcalyptic mood and images are an inevitable consequence of our advances in weapons technology. Absolute weapons demand absolute enemies. Nothing less than the portrait of the enemy as absolute and total evil, incapable of change, can justify our possession and contemplated use of weapons that will totally annihilate the enemy and perhaps all other living things."
"One way we deny our common responsibility for war is by the self-justifying illusion that people are peaceful and only leaders are violent."
"For the moment we will only note this cruel paradox of human behavior- our propensity to fight for peace, hate for love, kill for life."
"From empathy comes a measure of compassion. To know in detail is to limit hate, perhaps even to abolish it."
"'To say that it had not been a very important day because the Second Battalion had but two NVA kills now seems ludicrous; it was a damned important day for those two dead men. When even just one man died or got his fingers blown off or his leg shattered or his hearing imparied or his eyes bloodied and blinded, it was one hell of a costly battle- especially if you happened to be the guy who got it that day. It's something generals and presidents can never understand- only mothers, fathers, brothers, sons and daughters, and wives...If anything has happened to our country as a result of the Vietnam War, it is our national infection with the sickness of the numbers game. We reduced the blood and suffering and death and destruction to mere ciphers, and in so doing we reduced our own souls. Numbers don't die; people do. Columns of figures don't disintegrate in the explosion of a bomb; human beings do. Statistics don't bleed, and if you can make your war a war of numbers, you have no trouble sleeping. Most generals and presidents sleep well.'"
"The major responsibility for war lies not with villains and evil men but with reasonably good citizens."
"We become politically potent by accepting responsibility, for better or worse, for the conduct of our leaders."
"When we reach the point in the journey of the human spirit where we want to become conscious, we must be willing to become real rather than 'good.'"
"When there are no restraints on our conduct, no moral limits beyond which we will not go to survive, no carnage, torture, or expenditure we will not sanction in the name of private advantage or national defense, then we are living godlessly, no matter how much we invoke the name of God."
"It becomes more and more difficult to imagine who we are without reference to our enemy."
"...'And from the joy of being alive in death's presence to the joy of causing death, is, unfortunately, not that great a step."
"To be human we must die. We need not kill."
"When we feel we don't count, aren't important, don't matter, violence becomes our last resource for crying 'I exist, I can make a difference, I am powerful.' If we have lost the confidence that we can create anything that bears the stamp of our individual existence, respond to a calling by which we may earn a name for ourselves, we can still deny our impotence by destroying."
"Pessimists take a grim delight, optimists an easy comfort, in determinism. For both, the outcome of history is already wirtten and all we have to do is sit back and await the final act."
"The reason that most predictions about the future are boring is because they are predicated on the view that the story is already finished."
"We may prefer to die angry than to live with the kind of radical trust necessary to create rational and compassionate policies."
"Power corrupts, but so does powerlessness."
"If we must be dead right, and the enemy dead wrong, we will both be dead- right or wrong."
"We are now faced with the necessity to create a metanational identity...taking the next step in political evolution beyond nationalism."
"Trying to maintain the illusion of control is exhausting."
"The human species is very young. Our social evolution has just begun. Nature, Life, Evolution, or God- pick your belief system- is not yet finished with us. Therefore the past is not an accurate reflection of human possibilities."
"...the name 'God' must no longer be used as the sanctifier of carnage."
"Nationalism and species chauvinism are idas whose time is past."
"If we don't yet know new answers, we can at least refuse to be hypnotized by old questions."
"And when we must fight, it must not be as holy warriors but as deeply repentant men and women who are caught in the tragic conflicts of a history that we have not yet had the vision, the will, or the courage to change."
"The hostile imagination begins with a simple but crippling assumption: what is strange or unknown is dangerous and intends evil."
"Paranoids begin with imagined enemies and end up with real ones as the cycle of reaction turns into a complex historical conflict."
"As a rule, human beings do not kill other human beings. Before we enter into warfare or genocide, we first dehumaize those we mean to 'eliminate.'...'The' enemy is always singular, a limbolike category, to which we may assign any threat about which we do not wish to think clearly...It is not a person we kill, but an idea."
"The most terrible of all moral paradoxes, the Gordian knot that must be unraveled if history is to continue, is that we create evil out of our highest ideals and most noble aspirations. We so need to be heroic, to be on the side of God, to eliminate evil, to clean up the world, to be victorius over death, that we visit destruction and death on all who stand in the way of our heroic historical destiny. We scapegoat and create absolute enemies, not because we are intrinsically cruel, but because focusing our anger on an outside target, striking at strangers, brings our tribe or nation together and allows us to be a part of a close and loving in-group. We create surplus evil because we need to belong."
"It should not escape our notice that the new apolcalyptic mood and images are an inevitable consequence of our advances in weapons technology. Absolute weapons demand absolute enemies. Nothing less than the portrait of the enemy as absolute and total evil, incapable of change, can justify our possession and contemplated use of weapons that will totally annihilate the enemy and perhaps all other living things."
"One way we deny our common responsibility for war is by the self-justifying illusion that people are peaceful and only leaders are violent."
"For the moment we will only note this cruel paradox of human behavior- our propensity to fight for peace, hate for love, kill for life."
"From empathy comes a measure of compassion. To know in detail is to limit hate, perhaps even to abolish it."
"'To say that it had not been a very important day because the Second Battalion had but two NVA kills now seems ludicrous; it was a damned important day for those two dead men. When even just one man died or got his fingers blown off or his leg shattered or his hearing imparied or his eyes bloodied and blinded, it was one hell of a costly battle- especially if you happened to be the guy who got it that day. It's something generals and presidents can never understand- only mothers, fathers, brothers, sons and daughters, and wives...If anything has happened to our country as a result of the Vietnam War, it is our national infection with the sickness of the numbers game. We reduced the blood and suffering and death and destruction to mere ciphers, and in so doing we reduced our own souls. Numbers don't die; people do. Columns of figures don't disintegrate in the explosion of a bomb; human beings do. Statistics don't bleed, and if you can make your war a war of numbers, you have no trouble sleeping. Most generals and presidents sleep well.'"
"The major responsibility for war lies not with villains and evil men but with reasonably good citizens."
"We become politically potent by accepting responsibility, for better or worse, for the conduct of our leaders."
"When we reach the point in the journey of the human spirit where we want to become conscious, we must be willing to become real rather than 'good.'"
"When there are no restraints on our conduct, no moral limits beyond which we will not go to survive, no carnage, torture, or expenditure we will not sanction in the name of private advantage or national defense, then we are living godlessly, no matter how much we invoke the name of God."
"It becomes more and more difficult to imagine who we are without reference to our enemy."
"...'And from the joy of being alive in death's presence to the joy of causing death, is, unfortunately, not that great a step."
"To be human we must die. We need not kill."
"When we feel we don't count, aren't important, don't matter, violence becomes our last resource for crying 'I exist, I can make a difference, I am powerful.' If we have lost the confidence that we can create anything that bears the stamp of our individual existence, respond to a calling by which we may earn a name for ourselves, we can still deny our impotence by destroying."
"Pessimists take a grim delight, optimists an easy comfort, in determinism. For both, the outcome of history is already wirtten and all we have to do is sit back and await the final act."
"The reason that most predictions about the future are boring is because they are predicated on the view that the story is already finished."
"We may prefer to die angry than to live with the kind of radical trust necessary to create rational and compassionate policies."
"Power corrupts, but so does powerlessness."
"If we must be dead right, and the enemy dead wrong, we will both be dead- right or wrong."
"We are now faced with the necessity to create a metanational identity...taking the next step in political evolution beyond nationalism."
"Trying to maintain the illusion of control is exhausting."
"The human species is very young. Our social evolution has just begun. Nature, Life, Evolution, or God- pick your belief system- is not yet finished with us. Therefore the past is not an accurate reflection of human possibilities."
"...the name 'God' must no longer be used as the sanctifier of carnage."
"Nationalism and species chauvinism are idas whose time is past."
"If we don't yet know new answers, we can at least refuse to be hypnotized by old questions."
"And when we must fight, it must not be as holy warriors but as deeply repentant men and women who are caught in the tragic conflicts of a history that we have not yet had the vision, the will, or the courage to change."
February 4, 2026
While some view this text as a pacifist’s handbook to warfare denial, the thesis of this book defines its purpose as a guide to identification of categories of propaganda. Multiple sections highlight propaganda apart from active wartime, especially during Cold War and Red Scare era agenda on either side of the conflict. Keen does an amazing job of gathering provoking images to support the idea that humanity creates enemies of itself, rather than humans being separated into predetermined distinctive factions destined to form dichotomies.
September 7, 2025
I will forever thank my high school teacher for recommending this book to his class. I only now got around to it years after graduating.
Although I question some of the ideas in this book, it is very potent, honest, and vulnerable. It doesn't shy away from the disgusting parts of humans. It proposes solutions.
Wonderfully written. I think "Hope is a mustard seed" will stick with me for the rest of my life.
Although I question some of the ideas in this book, it is very potent, honest, and vulnerable. It doesn't shy away from the disgusting parts of humans. It proposes solutions.
Wonderfully written. I think "Hope is a mustard seed" will stick with me for the rest of my life.
January 22, 2016
The subtitle to the book is Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. The book examines why “the enemy†is considered to be “the enemy,†and has many photos and illustrations of posters and films that show how hatred of the enemy is promulgated by the “other side.â€
The book starts off hitting strong:
“Ordinarily, the job of turning civilians into soldiers involves a liberal use of propaganda and hate training. A variety of dehumanizing faces is superimposed over the enemy to allow him to be killed without guilt. The problem in military psychology is how to convert the act of murder into patriotism.â€
“In all propaganda, the face of the enemy is designed to provide a focus for our hatred. He is the other. The outsider. The alien. He is not human. If we can only kill him, we will be rid of all within and without ourselves that is evil.â€
It's the idea of taking normal people and turning them into paranoid people, fearful of this “other†being, and whipping them into a frenzy in which they are willing to kill this “other†in order to obtain peace. The author comes out with another name for humans. Instead of Homo sapiens, the author proposes Homo hostilis, and it seems really appropriate.
Some of the worst paranoia over time has been shown by anti-Semitic propaganda.
“The purpose of propaganda is to paralyze thought, to prevent discrimination, and to condition individuals to act as a mass.†In this case, “to prevent discrimination†means to stop people from actually thinking about things, and discriminating between what is really truthful, and what the government (or group) wants a person to think.
The author also ties this all into theology, noting how groups assume that God is on their side. “...the sacred blood of our heroes is sacrificed to hallow our ground and to destroy the enemies of God.†Think about the Crusades, Christians vs. Muslims. In WWII, the Japanese thought the Emperor was actually a God. (Hitler pretty much considered himself a god, basically.)
“In actual unspoken fact, woman plays another unacknowledged role in warfare; she is prize and bate. To the victor belongs the spoils, the chief of which is the enemy's women.†Consider that, in the Rape of Nanking alone, there were at least 20,000 rapes of women, and this is just one place in one war.
The book is divided into chapters, including Archetypes of the Enemy, The Psychology of Enmity, The Future of Enmity and IN the Meantime. It is a little dated in that it's from 1986 and thus does not include the active role women have taken in combat fighting since that time.
Still, it's a book that will cause a person to do a lot of thinking, and the numerous examples of propaganda posters will give a person a good idea of just how far some will go to generate hatred of others.
The book starts off hitting strong:
“Ordinarily, the job of turning civilians into soldiers involves a liberal use of propaganda and hate training. A variety of dehumanizing faces is superimposed over the enemy to allow him to be killed without guilt. The problem in military psychology is how to convert the act of murder into patriotism.â€
“In all propaganda, the face of the enemy is designed to provide a focus for our hatred. He is the other. The outsider. The alien. He is not human. If we can only kill him, we will be rid of all within and without ourselves that is evil.â€
It's the idea of taking normal people and turning them into paranoid people, fearful of this “other†being, and whipping them into a frenzy in which they are willing to kill this “other†in order to obtain peace. The author comes out with another name for humans. Instead of Homo sapiens, the author proposes Homo hostilis, and it seems really appropriate.
Some of the worst paranoia over time has been shown by anti-Semitic propaganda.
“The purpose of propaganda is to paralyze thought, to prevent discrimination, and to condition individuals to act as a mass.†In this case, “to prevent discrimination†means to stop people from actually thinking about things, and discriminating between what is really truthful, and what the government (or group) wants a person to think.
The author also ties this all into theology, noting how groups assume that God is on their side. “...the sacred blood of our heroes is sacrificed to hallow our ground and to destroy the enemies of God.†Think about the Crusades, Christians vs. Muslims. In WWII, the Japanese thought the Emperor was actually a God. (Hitler pretty much considered himself a god, basically.)
“In actual unspoken fact, woman plays another unacknowledged role in warfare; she is prize and bate. To the victor belongs the spoils, the chief of which is the enemy's women.†Consider that, in the Rape of Nanking alone, there were at least 20,000 rapes of women, and this is just one place in one war.
The book is divided into chapters, including Archetypes of the Enemy, The Psychology of Enmity, The Future of Enmity and IN the Meantime. It is a little dated in that it's from 1986 and thus does not include the active role women have taken in combat fighting since that time.
Still, it's a book that will cause a person to do a lot of thinking, and the numerous examples of propaganda posters will give a person a good idea of just how far some will go to generate hatred of others.
July 12, 2014
One of the first books to reveal the variety of thoughts humans can have, leading them to hate. Keen's book helped bring me up to speed on the Middle East conflicts, as well as the propaganda of the first and second World Wars. A great transition into modernity after Aristotle, Socrates, and Aquinas for the time.
April 12, 2009
written during the Cold War, this is an excellent examination of the psychosocial use of propaganda. thoroughly illustrated and well thought-out.
March 11, 2013
Excellent – very useful for anyone who works in diplomacy, conflict medication, or even in the armed services.
November 17, 2013
Awesome look at enmity and how our perceptions of the "enemy" are shaped by propaganda which helps us to rationalize killing and perpetuate war.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews