https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kbWLE07NGcw
So like a great many of my contemporaries, I was drawn to the study of 20th century history. The German problem, what Meinic called the German catastrophe, is the hardest of all problems because the worst event, the Holocaust, arises in a quite advanced society, which had the best universities in the 1920s, which had the highest rates of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews of any country, which was generally recognized to be at the forefront of technological and scientific advance, and yet, and yet Hitler, and yet the Holocaust. And so for me, the big challenge in my early career was to try to come up with a better answer than seemed to be available to the question, what went wrong? As a graduate student, I encountered a lot of, to me, unsatisfactory answers to this question, some of which derived loosely from the Marxist tradition. And so there was a lot of Marx, Ian, if not Marxist, thinking that it must somehow be to do with the peculiarities of German class society. I won’t bore you with the details. All this seemed to me to be profoundly misconceived. I found Meinic’s answer actually better. Meinic, of course, lived through it, didn’t leave Germany, and published Die Deutsche Katastrophe just after the end of the war. And in it, he advances a number of, I think, illuminating arguments, one of which is that the German elites became excessively technocratic and ethically uncoupled. And it’s this ethic uncoupling that arises amongst the educated Germans that is the most striking feature, I think, of the story. Why did they become ethically… Okay, so that’s… Okay, so two questions there. It’s like, why do you think you were dissatisfied? So as I progressed through my degree in political science, that was my first degree, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the explanations that were offered, because they were always economic. It was like, well, these things happen because of power relations and economics. And I thought, well, you’re missing something here, because economics is embedded in the study of value, and it’s not obvious why people value the things they’re valuing. And so when you reduce the Second World War to an underlying economic conflict, let’s say, you beg the question, it’s like, well, people organize themselves economically in all sorts of different ways, so you’re not getting at something fundamental. That’s actually why I turned to psychology. And it was actually to address the German problem, which was the one that you just laid out. It’s like, how could this spectacular civilization, sort of at the pinnacle of the West, go so cataclysmically wrong? And I turned to psychological explanations for that. But why were you dissatisfied with the Marxist, let’s say, deterministic analysis? What was it about the way you looked at that that made that not acceptable to you? Well, you earlier on said it’s not that surprising that Germany had this terrific political convulsion because of all the terrible things that had happened. And you didn’t even complete the list, because after the hyperinflation came the Great Depression, and Germany had a very severe collapse between 1929 and 1932. The problem with purely economic explanations or socioeconomic explanations is that they can’t explain why the United States, which has an equally bad depression to Germany, that the two major industrial economies suffer almost as big a shock, why the United States does not abandon democracy and does not abandon the rule of law and does not embrace the demonic ideas of racialism, which were available to all societies. One must remember that the ideas that Hitler came to believe, eugenics, for example, or anti-Semitism, they were open source. They were globally available. Anybody could believe these things because they had been very respectable in intellectual circles from really the turn of the century. So it’s very hard to say that Germany had a much worse economic experience than any other countries, because countries all around the world experienced the Great Depression, and countries all around the world were exposed to the kind of ideas that Hitler had embraced. So you have to come up with some better explanation for the success of the National Socialist Movement. And that success is partly, I think, explicable in terms of a collapse of political order, the loss of reputation of democracy as a system, partly as a result of the hyperinflation, and then the collapse of the established political parties, creating an opportunity for an entirely new kind of political movement, National Socialism, to sweep to power in the Depression. I don’t think the kind of books I read as a graduate student came close to capturing the vital ingredient, and this is where we turn to Dostoevsky, namely the demonic nature of Adolf Hitler’s appeal. And I think that the great failure of structural functionist approaches was to try to write Hitler out of the script, as if it would all have happened without him. I remember Hans Mommsen, one of the doyans of the historical profession in Germany, saying his ambition was to write a history of the Third Reich in which the name Hitler didn’t appear. And that that struck me as the reductio ad absurdum of structuralist thinking. Without Hitler, it doesn’t happen the way it does, because Hitler has an awful charisma and an ability to tap into demonic strains in German culture. That’s critical. Very few historians have written about that. I’ll give you one honorable mention. Michael Burley’s New History of the Third Reich is, I think, the only book that captures the enormous power of Hitler as a demonic and charismatic leader, capable of displacing Christian ethics. And that is the critical thing. Hitler calls on German society to renounce Christian ethics, and that is why, by the early 1940s, educated German men are engaged in the kind of barbaric behavior that we associate with the Holocaust. Okay, so Nietzsche calls out the death of God in the mid-1800s, and we could make the case that that process cascades most effectively through Germany, maybe with France as a second-order competitor. Now, here’s how Carl Jung explained what happened to Hitler. Can I interrupt, Jordan, because God was more thoroughly killed by the Bolsheviks than by any other regime, and it’s actually very important that the great catastrophe of the Bolshevik Revolution happens first. At the heart of the great historical controversies of the 1980s was the extent to which Nazism should be understood as, in some measure, a reaction to Bolshevism. Although the historical profession ruled against Ernst Nolte, who made that argument, I think Nolte was onto something. You can’t really understand the rise of Hitler until you’ve appreciated the calamity of Bolshevism beforehand. As the holiday season unfolds, it’s a time of joy, gratitude, and reflection. In the midst of the festivities, consider taking a moment to reflect on the digital footprint that accompanies you through this season. Think about all the information on your phone, from anything you search, your location, to the websites you shop at, and more. Companies can legally gather this information and sell your data for profit. That’s why you need to do what I do, and keep your data private with ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is an app on your phone and computer that encrypts all your online traffic so whatever you do stays private. If you think incognito mode will stop people from tracking your online activity, think again. When you read the fine print that appears when you start browsing in incognito mode, it says that your activity might still be visible to your employer, your school, or your internet service provider. Without ExpressVPN, every site you visit could be logged by the admin of that network. We love using ExpressVPN because of how easy it is to use. The app has one button. Once you turn it on, you’re protected from prying eyes. The Daily Wire has partnered with ExpressVPN to get you a special holiday offer. Go to expressvpn.com slash jordan YT right now and get three extra months free. That’s EXPRESSVPN.com slash jordan YT. ExpressVPN.com slash jordan YT to learn more. Right, right, right. That strikes me as perfectly, perfectly plausible. Okay, so now there’s a profound spiritual unrest, let’s say. Now that’s amplified by this sequence of catastrophes that we already described that befell Germany. Okay, now so now you have Hitler, who’s an individual that’s particularly gifted as an orator. And so now I’ve talked to a lot of political leaders who are actual leaders, and one of the things that they do that makes them leaders is they listen. And if you listen to people, they tell you what their problems are, and then you can aggregate their problems. And if you listen to them, they’ll tell you what sort of solutions they’d like to see, and you can aggregate those. But there’s two ways you can go about it. So if if you’re a policeman and you grill a child about the sexual misbehavior of his teacher in the classroom, and you do that with enough seriousness, you can get perfectly healthy, unmolested children to come up with fantasies about mutilation and sexual misbehavior that are so brutal and all-encompassing, you’d have to believe they were real. And that’s because the child’s fantasy starts to manifest answers that would match the paranoia of the interlocutor, and leading the witness, let’s say. And so that’s what accounted for the daycare sexual abuse scandals of the 1980s. But the same thing happened, this was Jung’s argument, the same thing happened politically. So now you imagine you have this disaffected corporal who’s got a gift for a ration and who actually can pay attention. Now he’s resentful and wanting compensatory power. And now he starts to talk and he notices that certain things he says elicit an emotional response from the crowd. And so the crowd starts to shape him and he starts to enter into this dance with the crowd. And he becomes the repository of the unconscious, resentful, vengeance-seeking fantasies of the whole German Reich. And that vision, that hateful vision of destruction, ethnic purity and destruction, starts to make itself manifest within him. And then he reflects that back to the crowd. And when they become emotional about it, he hones the argument. So you could say, Hitler targeted the evil that was lurking in the unconscious of the disaffected Germanic population. And he was willing to take that to its logical extreme. It propelled him, obviously, to great heights of power. So he was the ruler of that unconscious hell. Now I read Jung’s work pertaining to Hitler and I thought, that’s the best description I’ve ever seen of exactly how that horrible vision emerged and also why it had such power. You had this skill of Hitler to collect and to orate, combined with his absolute willingness to go wherever the impulsive crowd was prone to direct it. So what do you think of that idea? Many historians naively draw a dichotomy between theories of history in which powerful individuals are dominant and theories in which structural forces are dominant. And this is a false dichotomy. What happens in Germany is that exceptional, charismatic orator emerges who’s better at inflammatory speeches than any of the others in other countries. That’s extraordinarily important. He has this indefinable charisma, this star quality. But at the same time, a social network of national socialism spreads very rapidly through Germany from its embryonic state in the early 1920s to being an extraordinarily powerful movement by 1932-33. And that’s not entirely down to Hitler. And this is a process we still don’t understand very well. It’s how Nazism goes viral, to use modern terminology. Of course, they didn’t have the internet then. They had radios, they had cinemas, they had newspapers. But we can trace the viral spread of national socialism as an ideology through the very rapid exponential growth of Nazi membership in the critical elections of the early 1930s. And you need both to explain this phenomenon. You use the Jungian term collective unconsciousness. No, I think Hitler articulated conscious fears and conscious causes of anger amongst Germans. It wasn’t that unconscious. And the critical thing you have to do if you’re trying to explain this to young people is you have to make them watch a Hitler speech. And you have to make them watch the whole thing. Because a Hitler speech was a performance of almost operatic duration. Nowadays, typically, it’s very hard to find Hitler clips online. They’ve been to a large extent taken down compared with when I was teaching at Harvard, when you could get really quite long clips and show people. But it’s very hard to get an entire speech. And if you don’t have an entire speech, you don’t see how it works. And you don’t see why the crescendo, which if you watch it in isolation, seems mad in context, took the crowd to a fever pitch that we really haven’t seen since. So demagoguery is something we have to understand. We also have to understand that all societies have the propensity to be led into unfreedom. It is not some peculiarity of German society. As you hinted at earlier, it is possible for all free societies to be seduced by a demagogue and then kept in unfreedom by a fatal combination. Prosperity, that the Nazi economy was much more successful than the Weimar economy. Propaganda, Goebbels was a genius, an evil genius in this field. And then coercion. The regime became progressively more coercive over time. It used terror initially in a targeted way, by the end in a blanket way. And these three forces together can subjugate even the most advanced society. It is unfortunate that this lesson is not taught in more universities in North America and I would say throughout the Anglosphere, because we don’t teach this. Unfortunately, a generation has arisen that doesn’t understand when it engages in behavior that is at least susceptible to totalitarian leadership, seduction and coercion.