The Urgent Question for
Men and Women: How Do We Want to Affect People?
BY
EDWARD GREEN
Part
2
III. When Contempt Drives a Person
I speak now about a remarkable book, which, I believe, can be of use
to everyone in seeing what kind of effect we want to have on people. The
book--which despite its provocative title has been verified by scholars
as authentic--is Hitler's Secret Conversations . It consists of
transcripts of conversations Hitler had with his associates at his command
center on the Eastern front--which he called the "Wolf's Lair." They were
late night conversations, over pastry and tea--conversations like those
many people have: to relax, unwind after the day's work. Only this work
was the attempt, literally, to conquer the world. As I quote from this
book, my purpose is to give evidence for what Aesthetic Realism shows:
there is a continuum between everyday unkindness and the greatest evil.
As Ellen Reiss wrote in issue 1121 of The Right of Aesthetic Realism
to Be Known , titled "The Cause of the Holocaust:"
There is no safe border dividing the everyday contemptuous thoughts
and conversations people have about others, from what fascism is: the making
of disgust for humanity tactile and organized, that triumphing over people
one sees as interfering with oneself.
I begin with a striking fact: that the ruler of Germany feels impelled
to tell, again and again, about schoolboy victories over teachers. It seems
he loved to humiliate teachers in front of their classes: for example,
Herr Koenig, who, in an earlier job, had endured an explosion from a nearby
steam boiler that left him with a speech defect--an inability to pronounce
the letter "h."
"When he read out the names of the class," said Hitler:
I pretended not to hear, although I was sitting right in front of
him. He repeated it several times...When he had [finally] identified me,
he asked me why I didn't answer. "My name's not Itler, sir. My name is
Hitler."
This is so ordinary. Something like it--one person trying to make another
look ridiculous--happened, I'm sure, hundreds of times today in New York.
And that is what the child Adolf Hitler is doing: exploiting his teacher's
troubles for a cheap laugh--all to impress his classmates with his superiority.
In the essay, "The Mind of Hitler," which introduces this book, the
British scholar, H.R. Trevor-Roper quotes Hitler as saying this--and the
very wording is a mocking paraphrase of Christ:
I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use
of their weaknesses.
In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known , issue 160, which
Mr. Siegel titled "The Suppression of Good Will," he wrote:
The Nazis around Hitler in l932 and later possessed strongly the feeling
that kindness would be in their way...How much we can do in the field of
annulling some consideration of another has not been measured yet. There
is no limit to how rigid, fixed...merciless we can be. There is no limit,
this means, to the suppression of good will.
IV. Ill Will Can Take in Everything
Everyone has played around with the terrible equation central to Hitler's
mind: the idea that weakness in another means strength for ourselves. Not
just Nazi dictators, but people everywhere, like to imagine that we are
superior to other people: superior in cleverness, family background, intellect,
and so on. And throughout the book Hitler constantly pats himself on the
back for all of these.
Simply being Aryan--his "family background" if you will--makes him,
he tells himself, far above most other people in the world. He praises
himself for his clever ways of outsmarting opponents--his deftness at lying.
And he fancies himself as having more intellectual courage than anyone
he has ever met--the only person not afraid of the utter "cruelty of Nature."
It is important that for 600 pages, Hitler never asks a single question,
other than rhetorical ones which he intends to answer himself--and he hardly
ever acknowledges learning anything. These, I've learned from Aesthetic
Realism, are signs that a person doesn't believe in himself; he is afraid
that showing any need of other people would cause his self-esteem to collapse.
And Hitler says he can't read novels. "That kind of reading annoys me,"
he says. As Eli Siegel has explained, to read a novel is to spend hours
deeply affected by the inner lives of other people--and this is something
the ego sees as a threat. Hitler is incapable of reading a novel because
he doesn't want to give full reality to anyone.
One segment of the human race he sees as very different from himself--and
inferior--are women. He says, for example, of his mother:
Intelligence, in a woman, is not an essential thing. My mother, for
example, would have cut a poor figure in the society of our cultivated
women. She lived strictly for her husband and children. They were her entire
universe. But she gave a son to Germany.
This is grandiose conceit; but how many children see parents--especially
mothers--this way, and later other women: as existing, not in their own
right, but to serve us , to make us important--not giving a damn
about our effect on them? In one class, at a time when I was angry because
a woman had been critical of my imperial purposes with her--and wouldn't
let me take her over, Mr. Siegel said to me:
There is a difference between having a person, and liking the world
through that person. You haven't been interested in that. Are you interested
in liking how you see Miss Valenti?
"No, I haven't been," I said. "Then you are just asking to suffer," he
explained. "What do you think is wise: to be angry, or to see your own
mistakes, your own regrets?"
"Why do I have such a hard time showing regret," I asked Mr. Siegel.
"Because," he told me, "potentates never regret...I think you were so used
to tyrannizing over your father and mother that you want it to go on with
other people." And to my surprise, Mr. Siegel made the same comparison
my mother had years before:
There are, for example, people like Nixon, who feel other people exist
to do things for him on terms he finds suitable. You want to feel that
people don't deal with you rightly-- but you don't say you yourself need
to have good will, and that is the cause of your pain. I say, any
person who is not interested in having good will is a terrific dope!
The kindness of this is tremendous. Mr. Siegel's purpose was to have a
strengthening effect on my life--and he succeeded! I love him for it; I
love him for making me a kinder person. And my education continues in the
classes taught by Ellen Reiss. Through discussions about music, family,
how I see work, money, and so much more, Ms. Reiss has taught me to see
the world and people with more justice--with much more feeling and good
will. Because of this, something big has happened in my life which--cold
and superior as I once was, would never have been possible: I am a married
man, deeply in love with my wife, Carrie Wilson, who is an Aesthetic Realism
consultant; proud of the good effect she has on my life, and proud that
I want to have a good effect on hers.
|
