Ponder what must have been the attachment conditions for German children from 1914 to roughly 1925. They would have been born to extreme anxiety, food shortages, and from 1914-1914, absent fathers and perhaps grandfathers, and worried mothers. The early 1920’s was the “wheelbarrow” period. Things sorted out about 1925, but even then, ponder all the men in all the homes with severe “shell shock”. Ponder all the consequences of war which never disappear–the fear, the pain.
A child born in 1914 would have been 19 in 1933. A child born in 1925 would have been 8. Was this not roughly the age range from which arose the Hitler Youth? And were most of Hitler’s early supporters not college age students, those born perhaps just before the war? As I think about it, any small child who suffered through that war would have been severely effected. A child born in 1910 would have been 4 in 1914 and 8 in 1918, and 15 in 1925. There would be scars.
And I ponder our own society. Where are our Nazis coming from? How is there so much hate, so much violence, so early? What is the genesis of our own attachment failures? One is the mothers working. Another is what I will call the failure of the extended family. But the main one I think, now, is the children raised not just with, but in large measure BY technology. It has made far too many of them functional narcissists and even sociopaths. They have ideas of goodness and compassion, but they really don’t understand what they mean. That is why they “value” them so much they are willing to commit acts of violence against people they don’t understand, to “protect” other people in ways they also don’t really understand. This is where the craziness comes from. They need to believe something, but they lack the emotional intelligence to anchor their beliefs in reality.
What they want, really, is to live in a giant machine with rules they understand, and can manipulate like their iPhones. There are ranges of possibilities, but all known and understood in advance. Nothing truly new just “pops up”. There is to be no genuine novelty. That they cannot stand. They are, in other words, demanding an authoritarian state, because they feel radically alone.
This aloneness is what connects ideology to action. We might define ideology as “The rational in pursuit of the irrational”, at least as it concerns ideologies like Fascism and Communism.
I will have more to say on this subject, but I have to go for now.