If you were a Jew in the period when the trains were running to Auschwitz, your chances of being hidden by your gentile neighbors were greater if you lived in Denmark or Italy than if you lived in Belgium. A common way of describing this difference is by saying that many Danes and Italians showed a sense of human solidarity which many Belgians lacked. Orwell's vision was of a world in which such human solidarity was – deliberately, through careful planning – made impossible.

The traditional philosophical way of spelling out what we mean by “human solidarity” is to say that there is something within each of us – our essential humanity – which resonates to the presence of this same thing in other human beings. This way of explicating the notion of solidarity coheres with our habit of saying that the audiences in the Coliseum, Humbert, Kinbote, O'Brien, the guards at Auschwitz, and the Belgians who watched the Gestapo drag their Jewish neighbors away were “inhuman.” The idea is that they all lacked some component which is essential to a full-fledged human being.

Philosophers who deny, as I did in Chapter 2, that there is such a component, that there is anything like a “core self,” are unable to invoke this latter idea. Our insistence on contingency, and our consequent opposition to ideas like “essence,” “nature,” and “foundation,” makes it impossible for us to retain the notion that some actions and attitudes are naturally “inhuman.”