Suguru Geto was not born a monster. In Jujutsu Kaisen he is, for a long time, exactly the opposite: a prodigious sorcerer, the best of his generation alongside Gojo, a young man of upright conscience who understands his power as a duty —to protect the weak, those who cannot defend themselves from curses—. His very technique is a metaphor for sacrifice: he absorbs cursed spirits, the distilled cruelty of human emotions, and loads it into his own body. He absorbs the world's poison so that others do not have to swallow it. And there lies the tragedy: in the end he poisons himself. The man who began wanting to save humanity ends up proposing its extermination, convinced that massacring non-sorcerers —those he calls "apes," "monkeys"— is the only path to a paradise. For Albert Bandura's moral disengagement, Geto is not the story of a good man who turns evil. It is the story of a man who learns, one by one, to flip off the switches of his own conscience.
// The theoryThe eight switches that shut off conscience
The psychologist Albert Bandura, in his work on moral disengagement, starts from an uncomfortable idea: most atrocities are committed not by psychopaths but by ordinary people with intact moral values. We all self-sanction with guilt when we violate our own norms; the problem is that this self-sanction can be selectively disconnected, case by case, without our ceasing to consider ourselves good people. Bandura mapped eight mechanisms that make it possible, grouped on four fronts. On conduct: moral justification ("I do it for a higher cause"), euphemistic language ("re-education," "cleansing") and advantageous comparison. On agency: the displacement and the diffusion of responsibility. On consequences: minimizing or denying them. And on the victim: dehumanizing and blaming them. None requires cruelty or hatred; all it takes is an inner story that keeps the conscience silent for just long enough. Geto is almost a walking catalogue of these mechanisms, and the order in which he activates them traces his descent with clinical precision.
Reframe, not hate
What makes Geto chilling is not that he hates: it is that he does not believe he hates. Bandura insists that moral disengagement does not change the person's declared values; it leaves them intact and builds around them a story that skirts them. Geto still tells himself he is a protector of the weak —only he has redefined who "the weak" who deserve protection are (the sorcerers) and who the problem to be eliminated is (everyone else)—. Genocide stops being called genocide and comes to be called building a paradise. The victims stop being called people and come to be called apes. This is moral justification in its purest form, the most dangerous of the eight: it does not anesthetize the conscience, it recruits it. Geto does not act in spite of his morality but —he believes— in its name. That is why he can massacre without insomnia: for his inner story he is not killing people, he is saving the world from a plague. A clear conscience, Bandura warned, is more dangerous than wickedness, because wickedness at least knows what it is.
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// The subjectThe protector who stopped seeing people
Geto's breaking point is not a sudden trauma but an erosion. Mission after mission, he absorbs the cruelty of curses —which, in the world of the series, are literally born of the negative emotions of ordinary people—. The more he protects non-sorcerers, the more he confirms that their fear, their hatred and their misery are the very raw material of what he must fight. He begins to wonder why he risks his life for those who generate the horror that is consuming him. And into that void the reframing seeps. First comes euphemistic language: the slaughter becomes a project, an "ideal world." Then dehumanization: if non-sorcerers are "monkeys," "apes," not fully human, then exterminating them is not murder, it is pest control —the mechanism Bandura points to as the most lethal, because once the victim ceases to be a person, all the other brakes become superfluous—. And finally the blaming of the victim: the world brought it on itself, he says; its own pettiness justifies its fate. Geto does not become incapable of telling right from wrong; he becomes extraordinarily skilled at placing every atrocity on the side of good. It is the same technique the series explores in others of its antagonists —the absolute contempt for the lives of others of Sukuna, the amoral curiosity of Mahito before the human soul, or the cold instrumentalization of Kenjaku—, but in Geto it has a more disturbing origin: he began wanting to do good.
Suguru Geto
// The crackWhat moral disengagement does not explain
Moral disengagement illuminates Geto's how with an almost uncomfortable sharpness, but it is worth marking its limits, lest it serve as an alibi. First: the theory explains the mechanism, not the decision. Many sorcerers absorb the same horror as Geto, suffer the same wear, ask themselves the same questions —and do not end up proposing a genocide—. Moral erosion creates the possibility of disconnecting the conscience; it does not carry it out on its own. At some point Geto chooses to cross the line, chooses the story that lets him kill without guilt, and that choice is his. Bandura studies psychological structures precisely in order to pinpoint responsibility with more precision, not to dilute it: understanding that Geto reframed extermination as salvation does not turn him into a victim of his own brain, but into an agent who actively built the euphemisms with which he authorized himself to massacre.
Second: neither does the theory exhaust the weight of the accumulated trauma nor of the ideology that awaits him at the end of the tunnel. Geto's moral exhaustion is real, and the series treats it with seriousness —it is not a plot excuse, it is the fuel of his tragedy—. But explaining where his weariness comes from is not the same as explaining why he resolved it by choosing hatred instead of retreat, doubt or help. This is where explaining is not excusing stops being a slogan and becomes the only honest reading. Understanding the switches Geto shut off helps us recognize them —in the ideologies that dehumanize, in the euphemisms that wash the blood from language, in the "higher causes" that render anyone expendable—. But the memory that matters is not that of the tormented sorcerer who believed himself a savior. It is that of the victims he reduced to "apes" so that he could sleep soundly.
The euphemism is the first victim
Geto matters because his fall does not begin with an act of violence but with a change of vocabulary. Before killing anyone en masse, he had already stopped calling his victims "people." Bandura warned of it with total clarity: dehumanization and euphemism are the scaffolding that makes the rest possible: take the word "human" away from someone and you will have taken away the protection of your conscience. That is why the mechanism is exclusive neither to fictional villains nor to sorcerers: it is the same one that greases real genocide, ethnic cleansing, the propaganda that calls yesterday's neighbor "vermin." The lesson of Geto is not to wait for the monster who announces his plan of extermination, but to distrust the moment when someone begins to call other people "apes" —because by then the conscience is already half switched off—. A decent society watches its own language before words have prepared the ground for deeds.
Three key ideas
- Suguru Geto embodies moral disengagement (Bandura): his values do not disappear, they are disconnected. He relabels genocide as "paradise" (moral justification and euphemism) and the victims as "apes" (dehumanization) in order to kill without feeling guilt.
- His fall is an erosion, not an outburst: absorbing the world's cruelty exhausts him until he stops seeing people where he once saw those he was meant to protect. The protector becomes an exterminator without ever ceasing to believe himself a savior.
- Explaining is not excusing. The theory illuminates the mechanism, but it does not erase Geto's choice or the weight of his dead. The memory is for the victims he reduced to "monkeys," not for the sorcerer who believed himself their redeemer.
Sources · further reading
- Bandura, A. (1999). "Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities." Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3).
- Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Prentice-Hall.
- Bandura, A., Barbaranelli, C., Caprara, G. V. & Pastorelli, C. (1996). "Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2).
- Bandura, A. (2016). Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. Worth Publishers.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Suguru Geto?
Suguru Geto es un villano de Jujutsu Kaisen, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He was the best.
¿Por qué Suguru Geto se convierte en villano?
Suguru Geto and Bandura's moral disengagement: how a man who began wanting to protect the weak ended up relabeling extermination as salvation. The euphemism, the dehumanization and the sacred cause that switch off conscience.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Suguru Geto?
El caso de Suguru Geto se analiza desde la Desconexión moral. Moral disengagement (Bandura) describes the eight mechanisms by which an ordinary person deactivates their own conscience in order to do harm without feeling guilt. Suguru Geto, of Jujutsu Kaisen, runs through almost all of them: he relabels genocide as "protection" and "a paradise of sorcerers" (moral justification and euphemistic language), dehumanizes non-sorcerers by calling them "apes" and "monkeys," and shifts the weight of his acts onto a world that —he says— has earned it. The prodigy who swore to protect the weak ended up proposing their extermination, never once ceasing to believe himself a savior.
