Are you not afraid of becoming a Nazi?
“How Do You Think Nazism Happened?”
This question is the title of a remarkable text by Lauren Reiff. She confronts us with the psychological defenses we use to not admit that we too have our monstrous side. Here are three of her best insights:
“[…] people automatically feel inclined, with a weary sigh and a confused shake of their heads to lament — “I just don’t understand,” as if they really are some exemplar of unsullied human morality that fundamentally can’t comprehend the dark, destructive impulses that threaded through Nazism in those days. What does that really mean — not understanding?”
“Nobody wants to believe that if they lived in 1930s Germany that they would have been swept into the Nazi movement themselves.”
“If you can’t recognize the monstrous part hidden inside of you and then subsequently tame it, then who’s to say you won’t become a monster yourself?”
They are so very true. “Not understanding, not believing and not recognizing” are ways of remaining unconscious of this terrible truth: we are as susceptible to being a Nazi as anyone else. Worst of all, we are susceptible to becoming a Nazi right now. And remaining unconscious will just make it even more likely, particularly in times when populism, authoritarianism and fascism are on the rise.
Having a personal moral standpoint is absolutely necessary if people in general are to resist identifying themselves with collective ideologies, such as Nazism or the ones our “leaders” currently promote. This is also necessary if they want to avoid losing their individual consciousness, with catastrophic consequences to themselves and society.
However, the ideas implied by Reiff’s text are way more complex than that. Honestly confronting our own evil side produces quite a paradoxical type of consciousness that is hard for people in general to sustain.
On the one hand, admitting our evil side — our evil needs — implies finding a way to express it into behaviors, or our approach to it will only be theoretical and produce no true psychological change. But acknowledging our evil side and finding an ethical way of putting it to practice destroys our very notion of our own morality, whatever that notion is, and proves us to be non-moral beings. At the very least, we become disappointed with our own reality.
On the other hand, acknowledging our evil side also destroys a base-line sense of moral superiority that our psyches naturally predispose us to have in the early stages of psychological development. By admitting that we are not morally superior, but effectively capable of the most atrocious deeds, like anyone else, we become less self-righteous and judgmental.
Those who consider themselves morally superior — as the Nazis did — feel entitled to force others to comply with their strict views, paving the way for inhumanity. Paradoxically, admitting our own evil sides in a practical way forces us to experience a harsh ethical conflict, but ultimately makes us humane towards ourselves and others.