To escape from one’s body into one's culture or nation is to embrace the dream of immortality. This is the bedrock from which human psychology derives.  One’s own body is in the process of disintegrating. The body of culture, however, seems eternally able to renew and replenish itself. One wishes to fuse one's being with a "body politic."

The “body of culture”—unlike one’s own body—does not seem subject to decay. It “keeps on keepin’ on.” "All men die, but the record lives" (Grantland Rice on baseball statistics). To project one’s self onto this “higher level” is to identify with a fantasy of eternal self-perpetuation.

I embraced this fantasy when I was six years old with my first poem: "Baseball is a funny game. The score will never be the same. And if you have a famous name, you might reach the hall of fame."

There is a baseball hall of fame, a football hall of fame, a rock 'n' roll hall of fame, a hall of fame for just about everything.

"History" is a hall of fame. To be admitted into this hall of fame, one has to kill a lot of people. Hitler qualified, as did Mao and Stalin and also Abraham Lincoln. One kills in order to be  be "written up in the history books."

To begin to free the self is to “split” from identification with society--the vast "culture” with which one had equated one’s self. But no one wishes to do this: "nobody wants to be left out; it's a family affair." 

This is the unkindest cut of all: abandoning the realm in which the idea of immortality is contained. One’s life becomes small, finite. Separation from the symbolic order brings one back to earth; shrinking into the actuality of existence. 

For Hitler, the idea of death was split off into the Jew—to maintain the idea of Germany as an immortal body. The experience of national disintegration (the Jewish "force of destruction") represented return of the repressed death instinct; perception of one’s own internal disintegration transmogrified into a horrific “disease within the nation."

The "disease within the nation" was the disease of death. Death was conceived as a Jewish disease spoiling the fantasy of immortality of Germany. Killing Jews was killing the  death instinct. 

The dream of the nation is the desire for an omnipotent body, free of defect, disease and death. However, defect, disease and death exist within one's own body. Projected outward, perception of a national disease leaders to the struggle to “rescue" one's nation. 

To save one's nation one must kill one's enemy: the source of death.