Death Eaters

The distinction the definition insists on is between an individual and a society. Sadism as a personality feature is a matter for individuals, and Marsh explicitly sets that aside. What the term names is a society whose norms, structure and actions are all built to feed sadism, which makes the cruelty institutional rather than deviant and means the people involved are conforming rather than transgressing. The second sentence supplies the test. Where suffering is a by-product, it can be reduced without changing anything essential about the arrangement, and its persistence indicates indifference or bad design. Where the agony of others is the goal, reforms that reduce suffering will be resisted, because they remove the thing the arrangement exists to produce. That gives an observable signature, and it connects to what Marsh says elsewhere about people who greet violence, poverty and illness with excitement and extreme resistance to efforts to prevent them, even at cost to themselves. The energy account gives the reason. Secondary anima is obtained through the destruction of others, so a structure organized around extracting it needs the destruction to continue and will defend it against improvement. The term is used as a category of society rather than as an insult aimed at individuals, which is the point of separating it from personality disorder.

The phrase comes from the Harry Potter novels, where it names the followers of the story's central villain, and it has passed into political invective as a term for people held to relish harm. Marsh uses it as a technical category rather than as an insult. The nearest scholarly neighbours are Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil, which locates atrocity in ordinary conformity rather than in monstrousness, Harald Welzer on societies that reorganize their morality around killing and the criminological literature on state crime and crimes of obedience. Marsh's version differs in refusing the ordinariness. Arendt's functionaries are indifferent to suffering, while a death eater society is organized to produce it, which is a stronger claim and a testable one.