David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

end of the war that the puzzle was
solved by the Canadian psychiatrist J. T.
MacCurdy, in a book called The
Structure of Morale.
MacCurdy argued that when a bomb
falls, it divides the affected population
into three groups. The first group is the
people killed. They are the ones for
whom the experience of the bombing is
—obviously—the most devastating. But
as MacCurdy pointed out (perhaps a bit
callously), “the morale of the community
depends on the reaction of the survivors,
so from that point of view, the killed do
not matter. Put this way the fact is
obvious, corpses do not run about
spreading panic.”
The next group he called the near