Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DaddySatyr
Reading Mein Kampf can give us a look into insanity. It can show us, with the aid of the history which followed some of the earliest sown seeds of the insanity that was the third reich.
This is a perfect example of missing the lesson.
At the time when he wrote Mein Kampf, neither he, nor his country, was insane. The point of the exercise is to realize how things go off the rails. One step, one day, at a time. To realize that we are as susceptible as the Germans of the 30's were, and that when we go off the rails ourselves, it will be without seeing it happen until it is too late, if even then. And to realize that unless we learn to recognize the manner in which the initially sane ends up going haywire, we will be repeating this mistake again and again, and that unless we listen to those warning us where we are going (there were such voices also in the Reich, and before), we will not see it on the way there and the next Holocaust will seem sensible to those carrying bodies to the incinerators.
Dismissing horrors as insanity or monstrosity is a plain refusal to see the truth.
I've often said insanity is the human mind doing its thing, because that's actually fairly accurate.
Our mind has the capacity for the irrational. It has any number of features built in to enable it to work in a wide range of circumstances and modalities, with a good result most of the time. For example, the reason why we can accept a culture- or a morality- is that we are able to ignore all those contradictions that litter every instance of such humanity has ever produced. Which allows refinement over successive generations, a labor that one generation usually cannot complete on its own. But the same facilities allow for delusions, denial, and so forth. It's important to realize that the traits that most protect us from neuroses are the ones that permit stable and reliable adherence to the most senseless of doctrines and pursuit of the most reprehensible ideals. We have few good safeguards and operate in a state of controlled failure.
We are not free to escape the consequences of stepping into the abyss we refuse to see.
As such, it's good to pay attention to where and how others have lost their footing, without the illusion that we are somehow less susceptible, or more surefooted, than they were. The story of the Third Reich is the story of humanity as it was, is, and will ever be. Unless we realize that, we will never grasp the material points of how it happened, nor catch ourselves when it happens again.
It's easy to see a demon. That's the human mind doing its thing. A delusion.
It's harder to see a regular human being.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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