Roger Berkowitz usually has something meaningful to say. Berkowitz is the Founder and Academic Director of The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. I have signed up to get his weekly email bulletins, which arrive at my inbox on Sundays. You can do the same, if you'd like to. Click the link I have just provided.
At the end of this blog posting I am reproducing the entirety of the Berkowitz bulletin from Sunday, January 7th. That bulletin is Berkowitz' effort, at least in part, to understand the origins of the popular support enjoyed by our former president, Donald Trump. Berkowitz does so by comparing Trump to Hitler. I will copy, immediately below, the lines I found most explanatory. I hope you will read the entirety of what Berkowitz has to say.
The attraction of Hitler’s personality, Orwell argues, is based in a profound sense of insufferable grievance. It is often unclear, he writes, precisely what Hitler’s grievance is, but the vibrant attraction Hitler held on his followers emerged from his self-presentation as a victim, someone suffering deeply from an unjust world. If the world is against you, what Hitler offered is a solidarity in justified anger and a plan to remedy that injustice.
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Orwell on the Falsity of Hedonism
01-06-2024
Roger Berkowitz
In conversations with students and even a fishing guide over the past few months, I’ve encountered a simplistic version of the thesis that it is “all about the money.” Some of my students see the world through a socialist lens. The rich and powerful care only about money. My fishing guide is a Trump supporter and evangelical. He also sees the establishment as corrupt and beholden to the mighty dollar: Biden is as much a criminal as Trump. All elections are rigged. It's all about the powerful taking power and money for themselves. My students and my guide couldn’t be more different. And yet, they share the reductionist view that money and corruption are the root of evil.
It is undeniable that money is important and corrupting. In our world, money can bring security, comfort, and power. Money also drives politics, as expressed by the famous Bill Clinton mantra, “It's the economy stupid.” But it is a mistake to think that money is the only desire that makes the world go ‘round. While people want money and power, they also crave meaning. Religion gives people a sense of spiritual purpose. Political movements from environmentalism to anti-abortionism offer the hope that our lives are not purposeless and not just about working and surviving. Nationalism offers the pseudo-mystical belief that we are not alone, that we are part of a collective that has importance beyond our mortal individual lives.
More so than economics, a politics of meaning and identity is driving our current politicization and polarization. And this is not new. I recently came across George Orwell’s 1940 review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Orwell begins by noting the powerful attraction that Hitler holds for Germans but also for people around the world. One core source of that attraction is “the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics.” A rigid mind may not seem so attractive, but it has the great advantage of consistency, of denying the complexity and unpredictability of the world that causes so much stress and discomfort.
The attraction of Hitler’s personality, Orwell argues, is based in a profound sense of insufferable grievance. It is often unclear, he writes, precisely what Hitler’s grievance is, but the vibrant attraction Hitler held on his followers emerged from his self-presentation as a victim, someone suffering deeply from an unjust world. If the world is against you, what Hitler offered is a solidarity in justified anger and a plan to remedy that injustice.
If the Jews are behind a world conspiracy that advantages them and their elite friends, expelling and killing the Jews makes simplistic sense. That is the reason it is always important to remember that Nazism stands for National Socialism. It is a socialist philosophy, but not one based on the proletariat. Rather, it is grounded on the solidarity of race. But it has its origins in victimhood. Along these lines, Orwell writes of Hitler:
He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.
The central theme of Orwell’s review–and the one most relevant to our world today—is his insight that Hitler’s persuasiveness rises out of his understanding that we humans don’t simply want comfort, security, and ease. Hitler “grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life.” The technocratic fallacy is that if we economists and social scientists offer the people comfort, economic prosperity, and material goods, they will be happy to be led and governed. And there is some truth in this technocratic manta. It is the basis of “Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought,[which] has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.”
But Hitler saw through this progressive fantasy. For Orwell, Hitler understood that “In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”
Why is it that as the economy in the US and around the world is growing, victimhood and anger are rising as well? Orwell tells us that the real source of today’s polarization and political movements is not economics, but a psychological need for meaning. He writes of the 1930s:
However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”
We need to understand that what drives the current political radicalism on both the left and the right is a desire to find meaning. Those who would “burn the system to the ground” may be nihilists, they may believe that there are no higher values. But their willingness to suffer for destruction is rooted in a sense that only by cleansing away the evils of the system can a new and more just and more meaningful world rise again. To compete with rising ideologies of nationalism, imperialism and anti-imperialism, social justice, and more, those who would stand for a politics of rational persuasion must appeal not simply to technical knowledge.
What is needed is a passionate nationalism built around plurality and a dignified rationalism inspired by the meaning of humanity as the unique species who can think and act in a way that takes seriously the different opinions of others. We need to inspire people to take pride in their capacity to understand and engage with others very much unlike themselves (emphasis added).
Important topic! Thanks for sharing!
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