Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Nazis are Bad

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 21, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

07:24

Nazis are Bad

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Oh, hi there.
	I've been doing some reading, and I've discovered something I think you should know.
	The Nazis were bad.
	Let me explain to you why.
	Hitler was counting on a widespread anti-reason attitude, an attitude that no political party by itself could have created or sustained.
	In the field of epistemology, the Nazis were merely repeating and cashing in on the slogans of a 19th century intellectual movement, one which pervaded every country of Europe, but which had its centre and greatest influence in Germany.
	This movement, the defiant rejection of the Enlightenment spirit, is called Romanticism.
	The Romanticists held that reason is a faculty restricted to a surface world of appearances and incapable of penetrating to true reality.
	Man's source of knowledge, they declared, is feeling, or passion, or intuition, or faith.
	Man, in this view, is not a rational being.
	He is in essence an emotional being, and he must seek the truth and live his life accordingly.
	Hostile to the cold objectivity of the scientific method, the Romanticists turned to avowedly subjective fantasies, priding themselves on their absorption of an inner world of intense feeling, scornful of the shallowness of Aristotelian logic.
	They flaunted the fact that the universes they constructed were brimming with depth, i.e., with contradictions, A's endlessly blending into non-A's, and vice versa.
	Contemptuous of the static world of Enlightenment thinkers, a world of stable, enduring entities, the Romanticists denied the existence of entities.
	Their dynamic universe was a resurrection of the ancient theory of Heraclitus.
	Reality is a stream of change, without entities or of action, without anything that acts.
	It is a wild, chaotic flux, which the orderly Enlightenment mind cannot grasp.
	There is no such thing as truth, explains Hitler, either in the moral or the scientific sense, or as Goebbels puts the point, important is not what is right, but what wins.
	The corollary of such an attitude is unceasing intellectual flux.
	Pragmatism leads to relativism.
	An idea, the pragmatist holds, must be judged as true or false according to its utility in a particular situation.
	What works today in one situation need not work tomorrow in another.
	Thus, truth is mutable.
	There are no rigid principles, not in any field.
	There are no absolutes.
	In essence, it made no difference to the Nazi leaders whether a man obeyed them for dogmatist or for pragmatist reasons, because of his commitment to God in heaven or to the Volk on earth.
	What mattered was that he obeyed.
	But the Nazis preferred a man to obey for both reasons together.
	Dogmatism gave the Führer's words the aura of supernatural authority.
	Pragmatism gave him all the flexibility he could want.
	The combination made it possible to claim that, when the Führer speaks, his statement is a holy truth to be revered, until he contradicts it, whereupon his new statement is to be revered.
	Implicit in dogmatism and in pragmatism is a third theory, part metaphysical, part epistemological, that is fundamental to the Nazi viewpoint.
	Subjectivism.
	Racial subjectivism holds that a man's inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions, and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution.
	Knowledge and truth, one Nazi explains, are peculiarities originating in definitive forms of consciousness, and hence attuned exclusively to the specific essence of their mother consciousness.
	On this view, each race creates its own truth, and there is no such thing as the truth in any issue, the truth which corresponds to the facts.
	There is only truth relative to a group, truth for us versus truth for them.
	Altruism is the view that man must place others above the self as the fundamental rule of life, and that his greatest virtue is self-sacrifice on their behalf.
	Altruism does not mean kindness, benevolence, sympathy or the like, all of which are possible to egoists.
	The term means otherism.
	It means the welfare of others must become the highest value and ruling purpose of the man's existence.
	Since men do not agree in their moral feelings, according to Hegel, each group properly legislates its own moral code, to which its own members must be obedient, though that code is not binding on alien groups.
	This is the doctrine of social subjectivism applied to ethics.
	In the pre-Kantian era, ethical subjectivism was restricted to the occasional sceptic.
	Since Kant it has dominated the field of philosophy.
	The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold.
	In epistemology, the Romanticist advocacy of feeling is superior to reason.
	In ethics, the altruist advocacy of others is superior to self.
	The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is the feelings of others.
	On both grounds, the Nazis accept the modern view wholeheartedly, in a racialized version.
	Morality, they hold, is a product of racial instinct or national character.
	Morals vary according to peoples, and so the national idea prevails in the domain of morals.
	Ethical ideas, like all others, are devoid of objectivity.
	There is no such thing as the truth in ethics, they say, but only our truth.
	There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another.
	By reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent's brain an argument, or a bullet.
	Since Nazis dismiss reason out of hand, their only recourse is to embrace the second of these methods.
	The Nazi ethics completes the job of brute worship.
	Altruism gives to the use of force a moral sanction, making it not only an unavoidable practical recourse, but also a positive virtue, an expression of militant righteousness.
	Social justice in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual.
	It demands that others put a stop to his evil.
	Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships.
	So let's summarize the Nazi worldview.
	It is the rejection of the Enlightenment, the rejection of objective truth, the rejection of reason, and the embracing of feelings and of subjective truth, in fact of racial truths that are only relevant to the race in question.
	It is the demand for complete obedience, regardless of the reason why, but preferably for absolute dedication to the cause.
	And it is the moral sanctioning of violence towards anyone who might oppose these methods that finally makes the Nazis so terribly dangerous.

▲