[1] The first essay addressed the widespread disillusionment brought on by the collapse of the Pax Britannica of the preceding century[2]—what Freud called "the common civilization of peacetime".

[3] Freud laments the collapse of the previously held idea that "the great world-dominating nations of white race" had reached a state of civilization that would prevent such continental wars in Europe from occurring.

[4] On this note, Freud also writes extensively about how the war had exposed a phenomenon of "cultural hypocrites"—that is, swaths of people who had been exhibiting certain civilized codes of behavior not out of their own instinctual impulses but out of an egoistic incentive to adhere to societal norms to reap rewards in society.

In Freud's view, the war exposed that "there are very many more cultural hypocrites than truly civilized men" and that "in reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed".

[5] Building on the second essay in Totem and Taboo,[6] Freud argued that such an attitude left civilians in particular unprepared for the stark horror of industrial-scale death in the Great War.