There are no doubt psychological terms for and explanations of this chilling condition. The Nephites’ emotional range has narrowed to a savage bloodlust in which they cannot acknowledge or experience the tenderer emotions of love, family loyalty, or grief. Even the probability of their own deaths fails to touch them with anything like remorse or even fear. Mormon calls it anger. It seems likely that it includes a kind of psychic numbing in which only rage can arouse them. Almost certainly, they have lost whatever connections formerly told them who they are and what gave life meaning. Earlier, they would have built their identities from many sources: their families, their society, the satisfactions of work, and the sense of belonging to a religious community. Now, their identities have narrowed to the only strong emotion they are capable of feeling, anger; and they therefore seek opportunities to give full rein to that rage.
Such a pattern occurs individually and by individual choice. Obviously Mormon and Moroni and presumably some of their associates did not experience the same narrowing of sources of identity. Still, much of the responsibility for the general Nephite trend belongs to the larger social movement that was sweeping them along. The Gadiantons in the Lamanite armies had created a new ruthlessness in warfare that changed the known rules. Such widespread changes were, in themselves, disorienting to identity. The Nephites have reacted by adopting the same single-minded destructiveness to which they have been subjected. (See 4 Nephi, Part 1: Context, Chapter 1, “Historical Background of 4 Nephi.)