Horrorism, in other words, arouses not fear or terror, but rather a deep repugnance that sickens us to our stomachs.
"According to the defendant, every time he saw them kissing he felt a deep repugnance and in his opinion, they did not deserve children".
No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that.
They focus on the traits of terrorism that cause most of us to view the practice with deep moral repugnance: (i) violence (ii) against non-combatants (or, alternatively, against innocent people) for the sake of (iii) intimidation (and, on some definitions, (iv) coercion).
This reductive diagnosis of Salinger's "condition" is accompanied by pages and pages of testimony about how his youthful arrogance (one friend said he dismissed "Dreiser through Hemingway" as "all inferior" writers) and disaffection with his parents' bourgeois world calcified, after the war, into a deep antipathy, even repugnance for most worldly things and ideas.
As the bioethicist Dr. Leon R. Kass put it, we should pay careful attention to our gut responses to biotechnology: repugnance, he wrote, is "the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power to fully articulate it".
Perhaps the deepest cause of the waning of war is a growing repugnance toward institutionalized violence.
If morally neutral terminology is used for morally repugnant acts, it reduces the sense of repugnance.
Whether repugnance really offers wisdom depends, of course, on what you find repugnant.
"At the time 998 was built, apartment house living had not yet been widely accepted by the very wealthy, but as The Real Estate Record noted, 998 helped to change the 'deep-seated repugnance' that 'families of high social position' had for apartments," he wrote.
Leprosy often elicits repugnance.
