> [...] because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’tonly 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.
One wonders whether this desire for struggle, self-sacrifice, drums, flags and loyalty-parades is not a right/left thing, and whether the consequences of indulging it are independent of the stories we tell about it.
There's a deeper cause for it though I think. The civilization from which I write this comment offers comfort, safety, and hygiene and really everything you could possibly imagine, so long as you don't challenge its weaknesses and falsehoods. There is a (very partisan) quote from UK physician and author Theodore Dalrymple that captures it well, "When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control..”
The urge for those drums, flags and parades is a desire for the dignity that the comforts don't provide, and in the fascist case, it was also an opposite reaction against the indignity of precieved comfort and lies. My pet theory about the nazis was what made them so explicitly and sickeningly cruel was they were compensating for the psychosexual shame and humiliation, not only from war reparations, but from a generation of mostly fatherless boys (post-WW1) raised in the culture of the Wiemar Republic. They envied the masculine eros of Mussolini's fascism and directly adopted its aestheics combined with a new occult mythology to compensate for the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and with the promise of largely ethno-socialist policies. Jews in Germany were not total outsiders at the time (though there is no denying anti-semitism before NSDAP, Europe's historic anti-semitism practically defines it), many Jews having fought for the country and Kaiser, but nazi propaganda against them was all about scapegoating them for the liberalism (so-called "degeneracy") of Wiemar, and crucially, for the psychosexual shame of a generation of German boys who would eventually join the nazi party. Add freely available meth (pervitin) to the mix, and the dictator had everything he needed.
This doesn't excuse or explain at all, but rather, asks whether these factors have any predictive power, where if you add these ingredients together again, do we get a similar result, and how do we know the reaction is occurring as predicted without it becoming a chain reaction throughout the whole system? It seems like an urgent contemporary question to me.