Of course, this is also a characteristic of Islam. Allah is not the God of Christianity who invites men to try to understand His will. Allah makes arbitrary and obscure decisions and you are not invited to understand them.

This is the theme of the excellent For the Glory of God by Rodney Stark. He makes the argument that the “rational God” of Christianity led to science while the arbitrary God of Islam stopped the adherents development.

Especially in times of great uncertainty, many people are attracted to *whoever speaks with the greatest self-confidence*, and this is not always, or perhaps even most frequently, a voice on the side of the angels. As Yeats put it:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

Arthur Koestler analyzed the attraction toward self-confidence, using sexual attraction as a metaphor for political attraction, in his novel of ideas The Age of Longing…AVI, if you haven’t seen my review/essay on this book, you might find it interesting. Link.

In the 1930s, the most self-confident movements around were Naziism and Communism, and many people believed that the only choice was one or the other of these forms of totalitarianism.

Nazism as a youth movement was mentioned above, and that is certainly true, though I would add a bit to that. Most movements are youth movements, especially if violence is involved. When the tribe is threatened (even psychologically, more on that later), young men get activated and are looking for a fight. This is why when competing groups live near each other, the crime rate goes up even within each group. But Nazism was perhaps especially so. As David’s wonderful excerpt from Drucker shows – I have never read that last, and thank you – there was a sense that Germans had failed their destiny, failed their ancestors, in WWI. Chesterton had advocated that the defeat of the idea of Prussian superiority must be crushed utterly, or it would rise again. The idea that Germans were still superior, but had weakened themselves with Jewish admixture, was thus still attractive. That Jews had almost entirely assimilated was thus to their disadvantage, for it suggested that only the most ruthless of purges would suffice. Youth are especially susceptible to calls for impossible purity.

The Nazi elite, interestingly, were not recently elevated barbarians and shopkeepers, but artists and philosophers. They provided the intellectual framework of historical German superiority and destiny that the youth moved in. They were suffused with Hesse, Wittgenstein, Spengler, Heidegger, Fichte, Nietzsche, and Hegel. Patrick Geary: “Fichte made important contributions to political nationalism in Germany. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), a series of speeches delivered in Berlin under French occupation, he urged the German peoples to “have character and be German”–entailed in his idea of Germanness was antisemitism, since “he argued that making Jews free German citizens would hurt the German nation.”[4] Fichte answered the call of Freiherr vom Stein, who attempted to develop the patriotism necessary to resist the French specifically among the “educated and cultural elites of the kingdom.” Fichte located Germanness in the supposed continuity of the German language, and based it on Tacitus, who had hailed German virtues in Germania and celebrated the heroism of Arminius in his Annales.”

Their belief in superiority was not adopted conveniently for power but was in their bones. It was not an odd eruption but a natural outgrowth of their culture.

Why less-German people were attracted to the idea – the proper discussion here which I have not contributed to – is less clear. Ionesco found it all puzzling, though he described it fearlessly in “Rhinoceros.” Thompson finds it less puzzling, perhaps because she was not so fully a creature of the left. Certainly the Germanness would not be a draw, though perhaps a sense of innate superiority on other grounds caused them to think that they would get a pass and would contribute to making the new order (See George Bernard Shaw). But simple fear and self-protection, a desire to persist physically though the individual be shattered, was in play.

In retrospect, Nazism might even be considered to be nothing more than a modernist Aryan aping of the prophet’s message, and methods.

aren’t tribalism and nationalism really the same impulse, expressed at different scale factors?

In a chapter titled “The Return of the Demons,” he addresses the psychological roots of Fascism. One of these was the experience of the Great War–”Modern war appeared to be the denial of all tenets on which the mechanical and rational conception of society is based. This was not because war is amechanical and arational, but because it reduces mechanization and rationalization to absurdity…the war showed the individual suddenly as an isolated, helpless, powerless atom in a world of irrational monsters.” Another factor was the Great Depression, which “proved that irrational and incalculable forces also rule peacetime society: the threat of sudden permanant unemployment, of being thrown on the industrial scrap heap on one’s prime or even before one has started to work. Against these forces the individual finds himself as helpless, isolated, and atomized as against the forces of machine war.” As a result of these factors, “The European masses realized for the first time that existence in this society is governed not by rational and sensible, but by blind, irrational, and demonic forces.”

In a later chapter, Drucker specifically addresses the rise of anti-Semitism: “The real explanation for racial anti-Semitism in German, and even more in Austria, is that the substitution of the Jews for the hostile forces of bourgeois capitalism and liberalism was made possible, if not mandatory, by the unique social structure of the German bourgeoisie..Unlike the middle classes in western Europe, it was liberated from above. Its emancipation was not a social end in itself; it was effected for the purpose of national unification. Politically and socially the bourgeoisie therefore never became a ruling class.” (He means prior to Weimar) He then provides data indicating extensive intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in the German and Austrian middle classes, so that whereas the ruling classes before the war had been entirely non-Jewish, “the mixture with Jewish blood was the specified distinction of the new ruling class…When this class failed and when its rule led to the emergence of the demons, it became therefore “rational” to hold the Jews responsible and to personify the demons as Jewish.”

Later: “Nazi anti-Semitism…has been caused precisely by the absence of any distinction, conflict, and strangeness between the German Jews and a large part of the German people–to wit, the liberal middle classes. The Nazis do not persecute the Jews because they remained a foreign body within Germany, but actually because they had become almost completely assimilated and had ceased to be Jews.” And

“(Anti-Semitism) has nothing to do with any qualities of the Jews themselves, but exclusively with what the internal tension in Naziism requires the Jews to look like…The real enemy is not the Jew, but the bourgeois order which is fought under the name of the Jew. Nazi anti-Semitism stems from the failure of Naziism to replace the bourgeois order and the bourgeois concept of man with a new constructive concept. And this makes it imperative to denounce bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, yet impossible to resort to class war.” Later:

“It must be understood that for the convinced Totalitarian the personification of the demons and their persecution and oppression appear not only justified but alone reasonable. He is genuinely unable to understand why the outside world does not see the demons.”

thank you for bringing up the example (or metaphor) of the the Hensches and the Schaeffers and of those who, like the biochemist professor, commit the sin of indifference.

As usual, it provoked me to read some more beyond your inestimable comment, specially regarding Hannah Arendt and more about Peter Drucker..I always enjoy it so much when something or someone inspires me to spend hours researching and reading.

Prussian tribalism especially was at the heart of this, with a sense of Prussian superiority that dated back through WWI, Nietzsche, Fichte, Frederick, and perhaps on beyond. They believed they were destined to rule others, not because of their ideas, but because of their character. In one sense, it was simple tribalism, such as one would find anywhere else in the world, except they had the power to enforce it.

This explains much of the “give oneself for a greater cause” attitude, though perhaps not all. I see greater causes, however misguided, as at least some improvement over being only for oneself. But things that can rise higher can also fall farther. As CS Lewis noted, devils are not made from fallen monkeys, but from fallen angels. This is why each expanding of the circle – family, clan, tribe, nation, all mankind, can bring forth greater goodwill but also carries the danger of greater destruction – the ideal (if only possible) of communism or the UN become instead forces for evil. Which, given the imperfectability of mankind, they always will.

The authoritarian nature is not uniquely German, but certainly has had a long run in Prussian culture.

–Reinhold Hensch, who came from a working-class family, became an SS officer. He summed up his motivations to Drucker thusly: “Now I have a party membership card with a very low number and *I am going to be somebody*.”

–Paul Schaeffer became editor of a major newspaper, believing he could influence the regime toward moderation. He disappeared when the front that he provided was no longer needed.

–An un-named professor, a distinguished biochemist and a “great liberal,” was expected by many to raise objections at the faculty’s first meeting with their newly-appointed Nazi watchdog. His main concern was about maintaining the level of research funding.

Interestingly, Hensch had a Jewish girlfriend…he advised her to leave the country and asked Drucker to help her when they both went abroad.

Knowing these people led Drucker to object to the Hannah Arendt “banality of evil” formulation:

“Evil works through the Hensches and the Schaeffers precisely because evil is monstrous and men are trivial…Man becomes the instrument of evil when, like the Hensches, he thinks to harness evil to his ambitions; and he becomes the instrument of evil when, like the Schaeffers, he joins with evil to prevent worse…I have often wondered which of these two did, in the end, more harm–the Monster or the Lamb; and which is worse, Hensch’s sin of the lust for power or Schaeffer’s hubris and sin of pride? But maybe the greatest sin is neither of these two ancient ones; the greatest sin may be the new twentieth-century sin of indifference, the sin of the distinguished biochemist who neither kills nor lies but refuses to bear witness when, in the words of the old gospel hymn, “They crucify my Lord.””

On the evening of the same day on which Sebastian Haffner watched the Prussian high court–the Kammergericht–cave in to the Nazis, he attended a cabaret performance at which the commedian, Werner Fink, had the courage to mock the regime. In the morning, the Prussian Kammergericht, with its tradition of hundreds of years, had ignobly capitulated before the Nazis. In the same evening, a small troop of artistes, with no tradition to back them up, demonstrated the courage to speak forbidden thoughts. “The Kammergericht had fallen but the Katakombe stood upright.”

It is unlikely that Werner Fink had enjoyed a level of education anywhere near as advanced as the judges of the Kammergericht. It comes down to the character of the man or the woman: education is not a panacea.

seems like many genocidal movements are youth driven. the khmer rouge were, as were the people responsible for the cultural revolution in the prc.

there wasn’t anything particularly unique to the nazis, they were just another run of the mill mass movement. hoffer covers the psychology of such movements very nicely.