Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced. So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on.
Seems to me a key component here, which flows naturally from “punish any deviation from the profile” is this pattern of ‘punishment of non-punishers’.
Compare with this from Meditations on Moloch:
Seems to me a key component here, which flows naturally from “punish any deviation from the profile” is this pattern of ‘punishment of non-punishers’.