Hitler: Philosopher King

Hitler:

Philosopher King

Hitler: Philosopher King

Published ℗ 2017 by the Arlesey Press;

High Street, Arlesey,

Bedfordshire, United Kingdom

arleseypress@gmail.com

ISBN 978-1-9998340-1-2

Categories. 1. History. 2. Philosophy. 3. Leadership.

4. Psychology. 5. Sociology. 6. Biography.

Cover montage clockwise from top left Nietzsche, Hegel, Weber and Hitler

Copyright ©2017 Mark Morris

All rights reserved to the author. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed in any form or by any means including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Preface

A significant proportion of this book is drawn from the case history section of a doctorate thesis looking at whether psychopathy (the writer’s clinical specialism) increases the efficacy of leadership. Unfortunately for the research, but possibly fortunately for us all, following a decade of research, the null hypothesis was proved, namely that there did not seem to be a link between the two. Being a psychopath does not in itself make you a good leader.

While the choice of Hitler as a case study attracted some ennui from the doctorate history examiner (not Hitler again!) there did not seem to be a figure more likely to demonstrate how psychopathy combined with other leadership skills in being effective. In popular parlance, Hitler was a psychopathic leader. From any perspective, for about twenty years, he was also astonishingly successful, before failure engulfed him, as it does all political careers according to Enoch Powell. But it was the journey not the destination that matters, and much was discovered along the way, including the hypothesis on which this book is based, that Hitler and the NSDAP anticipated and rigorously applied the implications of the then brave new postmodern.

The thinking that underpins postmodernism is breathtaking. It seems to be taken for granted by people in the arts and humanities disciplines, but as a medic, a philosophy graduate, a psychiatrist, and then as a psychoanalyst, it was a path I had either not crossed, or had missed on the way. In an MBA course that it finally came to life. Years before, I had had a disagreement with my then training analyst about the issue of common sense. I was pretty sure that common sense didn’t exist, and I think he was pretty sure that thinking like that must mean that I was psychotic. I backed down, assuming I must both be wrong, and perhaps a little bit psychotic as well.

Then a decade later I discover postmodernism. By accepting that there is no truth, that all is relative and contingent, the world made sense again. Everything fitted into place, particularly my beloved psychoanalytic metapsychology. Built until then on the sand of Freud’s anecdotes about several turn of the last century Viennese neurotics, and the psychoanalytic cartography of my own wobbly psyche; POMO (as it is affectionately known) provided a more secure ontological bedrock; namely that individuals, groups and cultures invent their own ontologies. Postmodern epistemology, albeit nihilistic, enables the psychoanalytic model of the mind to breathe freely, rather than being constrained and throttled by positivistic hubris usurping to itself the name of all science and reason.

Written during the second war, one of the claustrophobic things about Sartre’s Roads to Freedom novels is the sense of an inevitable and awful slide towards a war that nobody wants but nobody can do anything about. The problem with a book like this is that in trying to learn from the past, one sounds smug and complacent, as if we know better now. I’m sure people felt the same in 1914; before the Napoleonic wars, before the 30 years war; before the Crusades. The only difference is that today we have spent another 70 years of relative peace perfecting our destructive technology.

Table of Contents

PART I THE SAVANT LEADER

1 The Philosopher King

2. The Man.

3. The Aspergic

4. Hitler’s World.

5. The Politician.

PART II THE PHILOSOPHY OF POWER

6. Bureaucratising the Postmodern

7. The Leadership Savant.

8. Bad Leadership vs Bad Leaders

9. Leistungstaat, the Power State

10. Contingency, Charisma and the Heart of Darkness

Detailed chapter contents

About the author

PART I THE SAVANT LEADER

Chapter 1. The Philosopher King.

In the teaching of the history of the first half of the 20th century, it seems to have become the fashion to describe the Great War, the Seminal Catastrophe, as starting with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of the crumbling Austrian empire in 1914, and ending after the deliberations at Yalta in 1945. The astonishing development in technology over the 19th century indeed created a conflagration in 1918 where the pomp and ceremony of the British scarlet and Prussian blue battledress of Waterloo in the previous century were replaced by the grim modern efficiency of Bergman and Vickers machine guns, this slaughter of the innocents continuing while the generals realised the implications of this paradigmatic change in the nature of warfare. It was as if the British squares, victorious a century earlier at Waterloo, simply dug trenches and fought in the same way, as if the hundred years of technology hadn’t happened.

The global conflagration of the Great War were a particular shock after nearly a century of peace had supported men in their complacency of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, made manifest in the contractual freedom provided by the state, and at the next level, between the nation states, such that war was a thing of man’s barbaric past. 19th century humans believed they were living in an enlightened, diplomatic world, where war had been eradicated just as had human sacrifice and cannibalism. The shock of the seminal catastrophe was that the grim realities of war became the nightmare of the future.

It is true that there was a pause between 1918 and 1945. The German Empire had been declared fifty years previously in through the humiliation of the French in their own Palace of Versailles at the close of the 1871 Franco-German war. In that same setting the temporarily victorious allies humiliated this young but proud empire; or more exactly, humiliated the representatives of Germany’s liberal and in many cases pacifist political intelligentsia, after the generals and political hawks had deserted the field as soon as Germany’s defeat appeared became inevitable in the late summer of 1918.

It is also true, as school children will attest, that notwithstanding its capitulation and unconditional surrender, Germany was starved with a continuing blockade, suffered a number of revolutions and was then crippled through the punitive war reparations imposed at Versailles by the allies as punishment. Finally, it is true that the resentment and disbelief in this outcome fermented and suppurated as Bismarck’s proud and victorious empire, built on a nation, the epitome of philosophical and artistic endeavour and realisation of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, suffered the ignominy of being a pariah state debased and diplomatically shunned from 1918.

But notwithstanding the legitimacy and intuitive persuasiveness of these accounts, the collective insanity that seemed to sweep over the whole of the German nation with the Hitler phenomenon seems to require additional explanation. The closest psychiatric diagnosis to the phenomenon of NSDAP Germany would be group hysteria(1). Although this is usually confined to small isolated groups of highly strung young people in isolated setting that sequentially get the vapours or mysteriously fall ill, there is an argument that it emerges wherever a crowd becomes adulatory to a powerful and charismatic leader or performer. But to emphasise the extremity of the collective delusion, the racist, grandiose and murderous ideas of Hitler and the NSDAP which are understandable and even common in small sects, political or religious; these were adopted, believed, embraced by, and then fought for by a whole nation, and perhaps the most educated, civilised, cultured and urbane nation globally at that time. This phenomenon requires an explanation additional to the historical and structural accounts adumbrated above.

This book constructs such an explanation as a hypothesis; an account to bridge this conceptual gap. It argues that Hitler and the NSDAP as a phenomenon were different. Hitler and his NSDAP were not just another political party lead by another charismatic demagogue. Hitler and the NSDAP were a product of a unique moment in the cultural and philosophical evolution of human kind. If part of the tragedy of the Great War was the Generals catching up with the paradigm shift in the potentials for human violence brought about by progress in the technology of killing; this thesis argues that the Hitler and NSDAP phenomenon was brought about by humanity as a whole catching up with the paradigm shift in the human condition brought about by the prodigious developments in philosophy and culture over the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Hitler and the NSDAP were able to opportunistically surf the tsunami of these new ideas as they crashed through western cultural givens and beliefs, allowing Hitler and the NSDAP to create their New Order in its wake.

The success of the German Wehrmacht in the first half of the 39-45 war was not a surprise. The states to the east capitulated easily and sensibly under the very real threat of a militarised NSDAP Germany that had been preparing for war for nearly a decade, and which was keening for violence rather than (like everybody else) desperately trying to avoid it following the catastrophe of the Great War, still very present in living memory. The sweep east through Poland, and then north and west, around through France through the invention of the fast moving Blitzkrieg technique was the master craftsmanship of the culturally militaristic Prussian state that had amalgamated the new German Empire.

This master craftsmanship from the Prussian people was the outcome of centuries of combination combining militaristic breeding and culture set up by Frederick the Great on the one hand with the intelligence of world’s most educated population on the other. The myriad small states that had comprised the former Holy Roman Empire each had its own university and cultural centre, such that there were more per head of population than anywhere else. That Germany in the late 1930s would conquer was not in question. That they would go to war at all, however was counter intuitive following their experience in the first. Why this sophisticated, educated cosmopolitan population, would firstly elect and then jubilantly follow a small aesthenic, vagrant, uneducated, and widely ridiculed lederhosen wearing Austrian private (first class) is the core question. The hypothesis in this book proposes an explanation as to why they did.

In attempting to provide an explanation; a theory for this, the Hitler phenomenon, this book combines two arguments, the first about a philosophy, and the second about a person.

The Philosophy

Firstly, the philosophy. The argument is that hand in hand with the leaps forward of science and technology and the industrial revolution of the 19th century, a quieter, but no less fundamental revolution in ideas was taking place in philosophy and social theory. Hegel’s magisterial and optimistic accounts of the unveiling and evolution of a human spirit with successively greater syntheses of facts and arguments, captured a zeitgeist of scientific and cultural development, to some extent crystallised, as he saw it, by the enlightened Napoleonic code. Hegel’s historicist sweep was translated Marx as a young Hegelian into the language of materialism and social inequality, such that for Marx, revolution became a developmental stage in this evolution of humankind, or of spirit. There was indeed a wave of peasant and popular revolutions across Europe in 1848 based upon these ideas, which were more or less successfully repressed by the incumbent governments of the nation states. In the subsequent peace, a question arose of why the Evolution of the Spirit had stalled. Why people were indeed diverted from their material interests by bread and circuses.

The answer to this was a third Copernican revolution, this time a revolution in psychology. Copernicus had proposed the original heresy that the earth was not the centre of the universe. The second purported Copernican revolution was a reversal in the way that we perceive things, outlined by Kant. This was more esoteric, but equally fundamental. Kant had demonstrated that all we can know are sense impressions, phenomena rather than the real world out there, and that we see or perceive the Platonic ideal and then fit the sense data into this rather than the other way around. Important in this account was his statement that the thing in itself (ding an sich); the actual physical world is unperceivable and un-knowable. The significance of this revolution was to amplify Descartes’ initial scepticism about the reliability of a common sense realist perspective that the external world is reliable and real. Kant went a step further by arguing that we have no idea what it is like because we never perceive it. All we have to go on is out internal sense perceptions – and these are based upon prejudices and previous experience. So, we can only believe science rather than know it. There are no facts, only opinions or impressions.

The hypothesis in this book argues that there was then a third Copernican Revolution, which provides the philosophical component of the Hitler phenomenon. As a named movement, postmodernism, it was not to be recognised and described until several decades after Hitler’s death, but this hypothesis argues that its implications were an unthought known; that is a structure of ideas that is being culturally enacted, although not yet intellectually articulated. It is proposed that the cultural implications of postmodernism were applied politically on a local, then national, then global stage by Hitler and the NSDAP with devastating efficacy.

Postmodernism can be argued to have emerged from three different directions. Firstly, Darwin’s origin of Species dethroned man from being anything other than just another animal. The trauma to human-kind’s narcissistic belief that they were somehow above the animal kingdom; that they were put by God to have dominion over them was shattered. Darwin’s account was in essence that we were simply apes that had evolved smaller teeth and larger cerebral hemispheres. Such an account of the nature of the human animal also challenged any Hegelian, enlightenment and science and technology driven optimistic notion of a cultural evolution and progress of human kind.

Secondly, Freud’s account of the unconscious brought together the emerging conviction in thinkers that as humans, we are not even in control of our own minds. In particular, Weber’s account of domination as obedience to authority presented this as an internal psychological process. We obey the law because we choose to; or because we choose to accept the legitimacy of the person laying down those laws, and that this conformity to authority is laid down in experience. Thus Engel’s account of false consciousness and the power of ideology explained why the workers in Capitalism’s dark satanic mills acted as if they were better off being exploited and accepting their lot. Thus Schopenhauer’s silent determining will to life hides beneath human kind’s thoughts, decisions and perceived freewill. In the same way as Copernicus’ original heresy was that the Earth goes around the sun rather than that the Earth is the centre of the universe, human kind are not the centre of their own minds wishes and actions, but these are controlled by other dark forces; instinctual (sexual, destructive according to Freud); habitual (as with Weber’s internalised obedience to authority) or manipulated and fabricated by powerful elites with vested interests (Engels and Marx’s accounts of ideology as why workers accept their disadvantageous status quo). In the United States, this malleability of human wishes and attitudes was fuelling the advertising of the American Dream and persuading Americans to buy things they didn’t need as the first consumerist society built up speed. In Europe, Hitler and the NSDAP were planning to utilise the same manipulation of human values to enact a political, social and cultural coup de foudre.

The third contributor to this psychological Copernican revolution had been emerging, but coded or frankly disavowed, and this was the emergence of a post Judeo-Christian morality and ideology. For centuries, philosophers had challenged the hegemony of the dominant western monotheistic religions, although most choosing to veil this to keep their heads and their jobs (with some notable exceptions such as Voltaire). By the end of the 19th century, the devout Kierkegaard has carried out a meditation and analysis of the ethics of Abraham’s near filicide; committing the heresy of subjecting an epochal moment in Judeo-Christian mythology to modern ethical critique, concluding that religious belief required a leap of faith, but simultaneously detaching religion from rationality. More directly, Nietzsche has declared Judeo-Christian morality to be against nature; a slave morality of resentment and cunning rather than a more open, healthy, natural contest of naked, raw power. Morality is no more than a signpost of the emotions he declared, thus morality is entirely relative, and entirely mutable. Together, at the turn of the last century, these ethical, cultural and philosophical tropes were fermenting a heady brew of ideas that undermine the ideological givens of centuries. Lyotard(2) would later term this the collapse of the metanarratives as he defined postmodernism.

Hitler’s Mein Kampf has been ridiculed as being a verbose and self serving vanity project, but within it is are two things, firstly his belief and value set, laid out and clear, and to which he would remain consistent and faithful; but secondly, there is an intuitive grasp of the potential of the implications of these ideological Copernican revolutions, and (this book’s hypothesis argues) an intuitive adoption of the implications and political possibilities of postmodernity. For example, in his discussion of the big lie, he argues that in effect, people can be made to believe anything if it is in a clear and consistent message, sufficiently frequently repeated, even after its falsity has been demonstrated.

The 14-18 war was the first war fought with modern weaponry. The 39-45 war was the first to deploy a post modern philosophy. Hitler and the NSDAP in the 1920s and 30s seized the philosophical finding of the mutability of ideology and combined it with the new the solubility of millennia old ethical and belief frameworks, particularly the Judeo-Christian. They created a new morality, a new history and a new religion, and used it in the single minded pursuit of the only thing of value that survives the caustic post-modern challenge, namely Power.

This book propounds a thesis that the philosophy adopted by Hitler in his role as Fuhrer-King was firstly the rejection of all traditional belief and morality enabled by the post-modern realisation of their contingent status, and the adoption of entirely instrumental ones in the pursuit of power.

In the exploration of the nature and implications of post modern and post structural thinking, a consensus emerges about the centrality of power(3). As a critical and analytical tool, the medium of power as it is exerted and manifest within systems can be used to explore social structures. For example in the operation of capitalism, as mentioned above, the importance of ideology is in the enactment and maintenance of the power of the bourgeois mill owners over their exploited and impoverished workers, so that the workers, ideologically blinded to their true interests, continue to use company loans to buy essentials in the company shop, and to be relatively content in this situation, while compounding their exploitation and the power that the mill owner has over them.

The difference between the capitalist and the postmodernist, is that for the capitalist, power is exerted to increase his wealth. For the postmodernist, within Foucault’s analyses and following Nietzsche’s dictum of will to power, power for its own sake as the only legitimate and real currency is the goal.(4) This focus on power as an application of post-modernism is argued in this hypothesis to be the philosophy that the Fuhrer-King adopted, and that became the strategic power behind the throne. Thus he was able single-mindedly to negotiate and strategise his way through local, revolutionary, then national, then international politics

This post modern philosophy, however, was also the cause of the reversal and downfall of the Hitler phenomenon. Operation Barbarossa in 1941, was embarked on at the point at which, if Germany had consolidated its gains it, might now be the benign political and executive lead in a German European Union rather than the cultural lead in a fragmented compromise. Nietzsche decries the pursuit of freedom as a bird that flies higher the closer you get to it. Power is the same. The regime and ideology built on the pursuit of power needed more; after overcoming the Polish Eagle and the French Rooster, to satisfy its lust for power, it needed to try to trample the Russian Bear, and in so doing, simply over-reached itself.

Thus, the power of a post modern philosophy that rejects traditions and extant cultural givens and assumptions and builds in their place new ideologies and moralities is that it can bewitch whole educated and sophisticated nations. These new ideologies can be synthesised and manufactured to be entirely instrumental to further the interests of the power elite. The weakness of a post modern philosophy is its essential emptiness and meaninglessness. Following the dissolution of the metanarratives, values, over-arching aims there is nothing else to strive for. No Jerusalem; no Republic; no Utopia. The only thing that Hitler and the NSDAP could use their achieved power for was to get more power.

Bullock’s authoritative nearly contemporary biography of Hitler(5) ends with the desperate question of what it was all about; what it was all for. What was the nature of the ideology that had cost a trillion 1945 dollars and 60 million lives. He struggles for an answer. However an interesting character idiosyncrasy of the Fuhrer-King was that the ascetic vegetarian Hitler had a passion for slabs of chocolate and large quantities of cakes and pastries, fed to him by the doting motherly wives of the Wagners and the Bechsteins. Bullock’s incredulous and even more desperate conclusion to his question was that it was all simply to obtain more cakes for Arians.

The King

Having described the philosophy, the second factor in the Hitler philosopher king phenomenon is the man. In Plato’s republic, he (in the voice of Socrates) argues that philosophers [must] become kings(6). Hitler was probably no philosopher himself. Biographically, there is a blurring of history between his own propaganda and the manufacture of his personality cult. The latter had him reading the German canon of Goethe, Kant, and Hegel between whiz-bangs in the trenches on the one hand; his contemporary and posthumous biographical and political detractors and opponents emphasised his lack of education and culture on the other. The reality was probably more complex in that Hitler probably was an Aspergic savant, so that there was