DOBU 159
behaviour at the taking of life in attempted suicide, but it
makes it clear that the appeal in both cases is not to be
pity and support even of one's relatives. Rather, in the
extremity of humiliation, the Dobuan projects upon him-
self and his possessions the maliciousness and the will to
destroy which are required in all his institutions. He is
limited to the same technique, though he uses it in these
instances against himself.
Life in Dobu fosters extreme forms of animosity and
malignancy which most societies have minimized by their
institutions. Dobuan institutions, on the other hand,
exalt them to the highest degree. The Dobuan lives out
without repression man's worst nightmares of the ill-will
of the universe, and according to his view of life virtue
consists in selecting a victim upon whom he can vent the
malignancy he attributes alike to human society and to the
powers of nature. All existence appears to him as a cut-
throat struggle in which deadly antagonists are pitted
against one another in a contest for each one of the goods
of life. Suspicion and cruelty are his trusted weapons in
the strife and he gives no mercy, as he asks none.