WAS HITLER A THINKER?
KOENIGSBERG RESPONDS TO JORDAN PETERSON
A thought on Jordan Peterson's analysis of Hitler's Ideology (see below). After spending five-minutes going through my book, page-by-page, line-by-line (a herculean effort, I admit, I couldn't do it), he concludes that Nazism "wasn't a movement that was predicated on an idea. Hitler's brand of fascism wasn't a movement that was predicated on ideas."
So strange! This brilliant man. He spends all this time devoting himself to my book, which demonstrate that what Hitler did--the Nazi movement--was based on his ideas.
In fact, Hitler is one of the most consistent thinkers I've ever come across: from 1920 to his death on April 30, 1945, he spouted the same ideas over and over again (at the end--before committing suicide--he declared with satisfaction: "We have lanced the cancerous ulcer, and the world will be eternally grateful)."
That's what my entire book is about (scroll down for information on purchasing Hitler's Ideology). It's a study of Hitler ideas and how they were enacted to create the Holocaust. Hitler's behavior was a direct function of the ideas he put forth. And the passages Jordan read from my book proved this was the case.
Hitler's violence was the opposite of "blind aggression." It grew out of a complex theory about the nature of the Jew; an elaborate intellectual construction.
Why Peterson's blind spot?
Perhaps it is because we tend to associate theories and ideas with philosophical thinkers and "rationality." But complex theories are not necessarily based on rationality. They may be elaborate social constructions. In fact, some of the most consistent thinkers are paranoid schizophrenics.
Perhaps it is also because we have a bias toward imagining that thinking and theorizing are associated with "goodness." However, thinking and theorizing (the Twentieth Century is a case in point) can generate evil, destructive acts. Lenin's Collected Works are contained within fifty volumes. Mao's Little Red Book is famous.
In actuality, Hitler's thinking was elaborate and complex. At the same time, his thinking was irrational and--on many topics--bore little relationship to reality.
For some reason, at this point, St. Thomas Aquinas comes to my mind. I'm not an expert on his thought, but I understand his writings were voluminous (he was required reading when I was a Freshman in college). He concluded, responding to the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, that "two angels can't be in the same place at the same time. So logically, only one angel can dance on the head of a pin."
Richard Koenigsberg
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JORDAN PETERSON ON KOENIGSBERG
AND HITLER'S IDEOLOGY
I am grateful to Jordan Peterson for reading and analyzing Hitler's Ideology for his students in one of his lectures. He spends five minutes going through pages of the book, reading more than sixty separate passages (or "statements" as I call them). He is patient as he extracts the meaning of Hitler's thinking in relationship to his theory of the "behavioral immune system."
Clicking the link just below takes you to the YouTube video in which he discusses Hitler's Ideology. He presents and reads Tables directly from the book (from approximately 1:07.29 on the video-tape to 1:12.01). Click the link directly below to view the video:
The Video is from Peterson's class: 2017 Personality 20. It's a terrific presentation and I suggest you watch the video from the beginning.
I've transcribed Peterson's words from the podcast (to the best of my ability):
"How do you think and talk if you are possessed by disease metaphors? Not the speech of someone who is possessed by anxiety; this is the speech of someone who is possessed by disgust.
"It's a purification metaphor. Hitler's essential metaphor was that the nation was a pure body, a pure Ayran body that was being assaulted by parasites that were subjecting it to disease and decay. This was the fundamental metaphor that was at the bottom of his physical message.
"It wasn't a movement that was predicated on an idea. Hitler's brand of fascism wasn't a movement that was predicated on ideas, like communism. Communism is predicated on ideas. But Nazism wasn't that. It was in the realm of embodied disgust and images.
"It was more difficult to fight against from the ideological perspective. It wasn't a well-developed intellectual movement. It was an embodied movement. Hitler was extraordinarily good at using the metaphors and images and his incredible capacity for propagandistic display to fire people up at a level of analysis that they weren't aware of."
Peterson provides valuable information. However, his interpretation of Hitler, Hitler's ideas, and the impact of Hitler's ideas on Nazism and the history of the Third Reich--is incorrect. I will explain in a subsequent Newsletter.
Richard Koenigsberg
HITLER'S IDEOLOGY: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology.
Information on purchasing the eBook is here.
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