TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About the Nazis

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

Stephen R. C. Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society. Inspired by Stephen's fantastic documentary Nietzsche, the Nazis, and National Socialism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpjz-wK5lrA Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Ayishat Akanbi here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873621622 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So it's a conflict of groups, and these groups are unequal, and respecting other people's freedom to do what they want with their lives and tolerating differences, that's just completely alien. The world is seen as a dark place of conflict, and it's either your group is going to prevail or my group is going to prevail. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations,

with fascinating people. A fascinating guest we have for you today. We're delighted to say that we're joined once again by one of our favorite ever guests, Professor Stephen Hicks. Welcome back to Trigonometry. Hey, thanks, guys. It was a real pleasure last time, so appreciate the reinvitation. It was a real pleasure last time.

We talked, of course, about postmodernism. You explained where it comes from, where it's going, and so on. But I was saying to you in our emails about coming back on that we here at the studio were watching a documentary you made, as you explained about 20 years ago, I must confess, the production values reflect the fact that it was 20 years ago. But what you- Pre-H-D in the video world, so yeah. Quite, but nonetheless, despite that, it was a documentary you made about Nietzsche and the Nazis,

and in that you talked about what motivated the Nazis, what motivated the people who supported the Nazis, how that is misunderstood. And of course, some of the philosophers who inspired. some of the things that they did and also the differences between them. But the real reason that we wanted to talk to you about that is, you know, the Nazis, in the discourse, at least, they're back. There's a Nazi around every corner there on the rise if you're on this side of the political spectrum and people talk about it in the context of COVID now, of course, and all of that.

So can you talk to us about, first of all, one of the things that really struck me in that documentary is you talked about the fact that the ideas that motivated the Nazis. They saw themselves as heroic. They saw themselves as doing something for the greater good. Can you just give us, because I think will be a shocking perspective to many people in the modern world. Can you give us a flavor of what their ideas were, why they believed they were doing the right thing? What drove them? Yeah.

Yeah, that's an important question. I mean, comparisons to fascists and Nazis and so on are all over the place in contemporary discourse. And we should be trying to learn from history and those comparisons can be made. but we do have to, of course, be very careful in how we do it. That's, you know, dropping the hand grenade into the conversation. And it needs to be contextualized. But yes, one of the interesting thing is the one that you're flagging here, that we have this image of the Nazis as thugs and as brutes

and as just the most evil people almost in all of human history. And they were thugs. They were brutes, and this was a mass movement, and so there's a huge number of people in the movement who are operating on that low level of humanity or anti-humanity. But I think it's a mistake just to write off the Nazis, particularly the intellectuals, the activists, the politicians, merely as brutes and thugs, as amoral individuals. That when you read the literature, they did see themselves as ideals. And the hard thing for us, particularly those of us raised on Western civilization with a very different set of ideals is to understand that there are people who can have dramatically different philosophies of life, including an understanding of what is good, what is bad, what is moral character, who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and really believe it and be strongly committed to realizing those values is.

in the world. It's a philosophical collision that comes out in political battles and then ultimately in war-like battles. But unfortunately, most people don't get enough philosophical education to realize the values that undermine or animate their own civilization. They kind of have a sort of understanding of them. They pick it up through osmosis, much less being taught the major competitive value frameworks and really get inside them and to see how someone raised in a very different culture could come to believe completely different sorts of things. So we talk about Hitler and Goebbels and Goering and Hess and all of these guys and they were politicians. Initially they were they were activists. But my focus as a philosopher and as an academic is to

say these guys didn't just pop out of nowhere. Anytime you are going to ride to the top in an educated philosophical nation like Germany especially. And in the 1920s, the Germans were the most educated people in the world. They thought of themselves as the most cultured people in the world. And there is a lot of evidence that they can cite in order to support that. And it's not just that. Millions and millions of people voted for the Nazis, you know, from all walks of life. It's also the case that mainstream, intellectuals, even intellectuals at the top of their professors. Germany was a highly philosophical nation. A German philosophy especially had the highest reputation around the world at that time.

You get a PhD from a German university. That means something. You get a PhD from a German university in philosophy to use one of our metaphors. You are a rock star, right? In the same way that we now, know you guys are British so you probably follow the the football over there you know who all of the main names in football right and you know who are the second tier ones are and you know a lot about their personal lives and so on that's what it was like to be a high profile academic in in Germany at the time and the fact is that the PhDs and PhDs who were professors were widely supportive of the Nazis, not only after the Nazis came to power. And then you might say, well, after they come to power, people are cowards or people want the goodies that the politicians can distribute to them,

but before the Nazis came to power, in the 1920s, the brightest stars in the German academic world, many of them are on board with some philosophical, ideological, ideological variation of the National Socialist Program. And then pushing things back even further, all of them are educated. Hitler read voluminously. He knew his Kant. He knew his Hegel. He knew his Marx. He knew Friedrich Nietzsche.

Anybody now around the world, if you are getting a first-rate education in the humanities, you know something about Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. These were not unintellectual thugs. They were well-read. Goebbels had a Ph.D. and was widely educated at several universities around you. And that's just the politician activist. So they had heavy duty support.

Now, the thing then is, and this is where it becomes very difficult, is if we're an educated person now in the early part of the 21st century, we've heard of Nietzsche, of course. We've heard of Marx. Maybe we've heard of Hegel. Maybe we've heard of Kant. But maybe we can't put too much together. But the point is going to be that there is a philosophical universe that was staked out by the most brilliant intellectuals, almost of all time, all of them German philosophers. And the reason why they were so influential and are still so influential two centuries later is because of their brilliance and the power of their arguments.

And that's not to say whether the arguments are right or wrong. It's that they are brilliant, they are deep, they are shaping the entire intellectual cultural. of Germany in the 1800s. And they believe themselves to be high moralists and deep thinkers, the inheritors of all of the great cultural traditions and pointing the direction toward the future. They haven't worked out. And of course, what comes along then is idealistic and ambitious and energetic young people in every generation. They want to reform their society, to make it better. They want their own lives to be meaningful. They turn. They turn in their culture to their most famous philosophers. They read them. They absorb them.

Then they go into law. They go become teachers. They become journalists. They become medical doctors. They become parents. They shape a culture. And the point is going to be that the philosophical groundwork by Germany's deepest thinkers was laid for the national socialists. It was a philosophical movement. It saw itself as an idealistic movement. And they were very effective also at at organizing and doing the nitty-gritty of politics and then successful in the in the political sphere. Now, the point of contrast is going to be, you know, so I'll use some examples since you guys are British, but I was born and raised in Canada. So we're kind of like the, you know, the little brothers, culturally speaking, so do you. I'm now working in the United States. But the,

the biggest names that most of us will have heard of are going to be people like John Locke and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. And if you're an educated person, then these are the guys that you read and you read them deeply and you read the two treatises of government and on the wealth of nations and on liberty. And it becomes part of your intellectual furniture. And you come to believe that some sort of liberalism broadly construed is deeply decent and moral.

And we need to have moral fervor to reform all of the illiberal cultural traditions that have come down to make society a better place and we become committed as cultural activists and political. But the idea is that we are channeling John Locke and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and so on. And we think that we are right. And the point is going to be in this, at that level, they know that John Locke and Emmanuel Kant, Adam Smith and someone like Karl Marx and Nietzsche and someone like John Stuart Mill, entirely different philosophical universes. It's a collision of philosophies, a collision of values. And then one of the things that happens, of course, by the time we get to the 20th century is that collision of philosophies becomes a collision in the

trenches. So, I mean, there's a reason why the French and the English had their guns pointed at the Germans, and the Germans had their guns pointed at the other way and so on. So the roots are deep and we do ourselves, I think, a disservice if we don't take the ideas seriously, however repugnant the ideas are, if we just say, oh, they're just a bunch of thugs or they were just lucky somehow and we're able to fool a lot of people. The philosophy is hard, but it's important. Stephen, don't you think that the reason we call them thugs, the reason that we call them brutes, is we do actually the same thing with people like sex offenders and rapists and people. where we go, these people are monsters. They're nothing like us. We dehumanize them by going,

they're nothing like us, therefore they're different to us, therefore I'm never going to be capable of those particular acts, whether they're Nazis, whether they're rapists, etc. Now, that's exactly right. Your moral framework is absolutely important. What standard you use to say, this is good and this is bad. And then when you apply that to other human beings, those human beings that you see who are most assaulting your standard of the good and most embodying your standard of the bad, those people, you see them as less than human. So the dehumanizing languages is very important. And then once you see them as dehumanizing, then you think it's appropriate for me to start treating them with less than fully human respect. And then that goes

all the way down to, I am willing to put these people in prison and or I am willing to, and or I am willing to kill these people. So the establishment of your standards of right and wrong, that's a very difficult high-level philosophical project, becomes absolutely important. Because ultimately, that's going to be the basis for your laws. That's going to be the basis for the circumstances under which you are willing to fight other people, either aggressively or self-defensively. What does your life mean? And you are going to be willing to kill, ultimately, people you think are evil and you are going to think that you are doing it in a good cause because you are upholding your standard of value.

And Stephen, you talk about the clash of values and value systems, and I think that's really where this is important because one of the values, it seems to me, of the Western liberal project, which we obsess about almost to a fault now is the idea of equality. And the philosophers that motivated and whose work the Nazis relied on, were explicitly from a different way of looking at the whole issue. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So the concept of equality, of course, is a rich one.

But in that liberal tradition, we also have the values of liberty, the values of individuality. We expect that people as individuals, free to run their own lives, their own romantic lives, their sex lives, their artistic lives, their business lives and so on. So all of this liberty, and we think that everyone should have that liberty correctly. But then we recognize that since people are individuals, they're going to have different secondary values and make different choices. And the universe is complicated, and so we're going to have different ways of conceptualizing it and so on. But if your bottom line

is the liberty of individuals, and that's an equal principle that should be extended to all human beings, then tolerance becomes a very important social value as well. So those form a bedrock network, as I see it in the liberal tradition. And the idea is that, of course, we're going to have our differences with each other, but by and large, people are decent. And, you know, if you go off and you do your thing in the artistic sphere, you're likely to come up with some creative, you know, artistic things. And you'll be fulfilling yourself. But I'm going to enjoy reading your novels or listening to your songs and so on. Or you might be a little bit of a weird, you know, eccentric inventor kind of guy and you're going to go off and make some sort of a gizmo,

and I don't really know what you're doing, but it's, and it's kind of weird. But ultimately, you're going to be making something that I'm going to say, oh, that's cool. That can benefit my life. And so I'm going to be willing to give you some money in order to have one of those gizmos. And so the idea is that we will live and let live. But if we live and let live, people are going to go off and do interesting things that are ultimately going to benefit themselves. and then us. And of course, if I don't like your kind of music or the gizmo that you're made,

I'm free not to buy it and so on. And destroy it on Twitter as well, Stephen. Well, yes. So the free speech element, absolutely, even if that's going to get a little bit nasty. But there's a kind of benevolence in that that ultimately we're going to have a peaceful society and we're going to be doing a win-win trade.

Now, if you then reject all of that fundamental, the equality, the liberal freedoms, the idea of tolerance, even the idea that people are first and foremost individuals, you're going to enter into a very different philosophical space. And so what we find in the 19th century, thinkers like Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche is a very deep assault on all of those liberal values. for all of them, first and foremost, people are not individuals. They are all of them seeing people as born into various sorts of cultural groups, and that those cultural groups have their own internal dynamic that is completely different from other cultural groups. And those cultural groups, they can't understand each other, really. They have completely different values that are

antithetical to each other. So they are not only unequal, but they're also not really individuals. All of us really are just members of these different groups with completely different values. And those values are so antagonistic that any sort of tolerance just seems impossible as well. So it's a conflict of groups. And these groups are unequal. And respecting other people's freedom to do what they want with their lives and tolerating differences, that's just completely alien. The world is seen as a dark place of conflict. And it's either your group is going to prevail or.

my group is going to prevail and so to speak all's fair in this bottom line by the world is not fundamentally fair the world is fundamentally conflict and whoever has the most power is going to dominate so i just want to you know cite for you know many of us who have our undergraduate brushing up against thinkers like haigel and marx and nietzsche that all of them are violent conflict theorists. All of them say explicitly that individuals belong to the group. They have different ideas of what that group is, that individuals should be serving the group, that individuals can be used by the group, sacrificed by the group. And if you are in an out-group, you are a fundamental mortal enemy. And anything can be done to destroy the out-group enemy. And that is the inheritance of

early 20th century German intellectual life and the Nazis are just a particularly effective player of that cultural framework. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Well, if you do, then EasyDNS are the company for you. Easy DNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be cancel culture, de-platform attacks, or, oh, overzealous government agencies. Eno's a bit about that.

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Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is head over to EasyDNS.com forward slash triggered and use our promo code, which is, of course, triggered as well, and you will get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy, that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. Stephen, so we're talking right now, and to me it strikes me, as dare I say,

a very Darwinian way of looking at the world in that there are winners and there's losers and that you have to strive, you have to be the best in order to defeat your rival. in order to get to the top of the hierarchy? Yeah, sure. Yeah, so at that level of abstraction, yes. And that being the case, they're called Nazis' national socialists. What does that mean? Were they actually socialist?

Were they actually right-wing? Were they left-wing? Or was it its own philosophy entirely? Yeah. Well, that's good. So then we get into all of the great debates about what is a socialist really? And, you know, it's like that we've had long centuries of debates about what's a Christian really or what's a liberal really and so on. So I'm happy to jump into into that debate.

But let me say that the Nazis, as a short form for National Socialist German Workers Party is the full name of the party. The party was originally founded in 1919 by this was before Hitler joined the party. And it was called the German Workers Party. And as that name suggests, it says that we are in favor of the workers against all of the other classes in society. And it is this zero-sum adversarial struggle. And they saw themselves as a revolutionary party. They were anti-capitalist. They thought that the government was in the pocket of the big bankers.

And most of the big bankers, of course, were Jews from their perspective. and that the way capitalism and free markets work allegedly is in terms of liberty and so on. But really, it's just the rich exploiting the poor, they're charging interest and living parasitically off the interest of other people. So all of this is worked out as an ideology. And at that level, it sounds like a very left-wing ideology. And all of the early members of the party were very well read in Karl Marx. Adolf Hitler in 1919 goes to a big round. and here's a speech by Gottfried Fader, one of the founders and intellectuals of the movement,

very impressed with this guy. And then he, on the basis of being inspired by this speech, decides to join the party in 1919. Now, what you have then is a, what sounds like a left-wing socialist version of class warfare, adversarialism, anti-capitalism. And that was part of Hitler's background. Now, the other part, though, then is the anti-Jew, anti-Gypsy, anti-Black people, basically anti-any anybody who doesn't fit our understanding of what the best kind of human being is. And that's another kind of collectivism.

That then is to say it's not so much economic groups that are in this brutal conflict with each other, but it's ethnic groups and it's racial groups and it's religious groups and so on. And there's all various mixes of that that's going on. And we happen to be a part of this group. And we have within our midst, all of these other subgroups, that really should not be a part of this overall community that we are thinking of as Germany. And this is the nationalism part of the program. And it says from that perspective, economic matters are part of the package, but they're only one part of the package.

We're more interested in cultures and societies as a whole, their language, their traditions, their religions, their racial groups, and so forth, along with all of their economic arrangements as well. Now, the point of this is that this is sometimes seen as a more right-wing approach to doing political views, and that's fine in a European context. But what is important here is that that also is a collectivism. It is also saying individuals are not free agents. Individuals don't have their own lives, liberties, pursuit of happiness and all of that sort of thing. Individuals are part of ethnic groups or individuals are part of racial groups, just as the people on the left are saying, no, individuals really are part of economic groups. And both of them then are saying there is no individualism. individualism is totally shaped by and should be submerged to various groups.

And so what the Nazis are doing, you know, you might say this is very clever as a political move, but they also believed it truly is to say, we believe both are correct. It is an economic clash. It is a racial clash. It is a religious clash and so on. We need to put it together. And that is why they renamed the party in 1920 to the national, social, German Workers Party. And they took the nationalism seriously in this collectivistic fashion.

They took the socialism seriously in this collectivistic fashion. And they did see themselves still on the side of the of the German workers. Now, at this point, Hitler had become a serious mover and shaker in the in the party. He was a highly energetic guy. He was very well read, very well read for a politician, even if we would disagree with just about everybody he was reading. And then coincident with the renaming of the party, they published a 25-point party program. So to come to the question about whether they were socialist or not, what's interesting is if you go through these 25 points, that by my count, 14 of those points focus on economic matters.

And then 11 of those points focus on other kinds of matters. How do you define the nation appropriately? Should we be dictatorially or parliamentary? Should there be freedom of the press right and so on? But those 14 points, and I would put it to you as a hypothesis, that if you read those 14 points, every socialist in the world would agree with those 14 points. And that's a strong claim,

but check it out and verify it for your sense. at Wikipedia, any number of other points that are out there. The policies with respect to government price controls, nationalizing of certain key industry, and various kinds of controls all the way down, the development of government education and running of the education system and so on. You just go right through the list.

It's all socialism. So I think what we very quickly we're going to get into, though, is the debates over, you know, how pure does your social social social social socialism? have to be. And does your socialism need to be nested in a broader context or should the socialism be, the economic socialism be fundamental? So what the Nazis are pushing for is not going to be a Marxist version of socialism. It's not going to be a Saint-Simonian version of socialism or a Fourier version of socialism. They thought of themselves as socialists. And they thought of themselves

as better socialist than the other socialists that are out there. So I will just leave it at this point. But the debate strike me as very similar to the Catholics and the Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox, all having their centuries-long arguments about who the real Christians are. It's the exact same sort of thing. They are socialists, but there are lots of different subspecies of socialism. The Nazis are in that mix. So why do we call them the far right, Stephen?

I think that comes out of, that's always struck me as a North American, is extraordinarily alien because when I was a young guy, I was educated in classical liberalism. And so what left and right mean is always culturally specific to the political landscape. Right. So in Canada, right, where I grew up, right, what was left and what was right, it means something different than what was left and what is right in the United States and so on. So I think what you have to do for that is to go back to the 19th century European intellectual context. And this is the continental European because the British are somewhat exceptional on this score here. And what you find when you look at the intellectual landscape, particularly by the time you get into central Europe is, right is a nationalistic form of collectivism, that you are part of this ethnic group.

So you're a German, you are an Austrian, you're a Schwabian or whatever it is that you happen to be. That's the first and foremost thing about your identity. And with that comes a certain language, a certain number of cultural traditions, with a certain number of religion. So you are formed. Your nation is formed by all of those, that constellation of group membership identities. And then that people on the left have a more economic understanding of your collective identity. So it's two versions of collectivism. One making fundamental economic matters, the other making fundamental cultural matters as well. And so that's the debate. Now, obviously, they disagree with each other on all sorts of applied issues. But what they do agree with each other is on the collectivism. And they are all anti-individualistic. And they also agree with each other that there's not going to be a harmonious negotiated resolution of the differences between these various groups. The conflict is deep and fundamental. And as a result, the conflict is going to be resolved by power. not by means of negotiation, agreement, democratic and parliamentary procedures, and so forth.

It has to be ultimately through revolution, fighting, and suppression of the other group. So I want to say, anytime you use right or left or even liberal and conservative now, they're almost useless in contemporary discourse unless it's a journalistic shorthand, and you know that you're talking for the British context or the Japanese context or the Russian context. Makes sense. And like you say, we all fall into that trap very often nowadays, I think, in our conversations. The other thing I was going to ask you, and this is just us getting some of the definitions out of the way, really, is I think in the modern culture, we use the terms fascist and Nazi interchangeably. Yeah. Can you explain what that is all about and the differences and what we should know about that?

Yeah, that's another fascinating issue because, you know, technically, and the academic in me wants to say that you should not distinguish national socialist and fascist. That they do have ideological membership inclusion criteria, but they also have historical differences that should be important. So the point about fascism is that fascism or. originated in Italy and the most important person here obviously is Benito Mussolini. But the important thing here, this is often overlooked, is that Mussolini was a man of the left until he was 35 years old, a man of the far left until he was 35 years old. He was a card-carrying Marxist and saw himself as working with the unions, organizing the workers, that the Marxist picture of the world was by and large correct in what we needed to.

do was bring Marxism to Italy and that it was that it's not an ethnic rivalry but rather it's a class rivalry that it's the Italian workers versus the Italian capitalists and it's the same so it's all of that line that we know and he was a true believer until he was in his middle 30s and then World War one happened and World War I he was shocked to realize was that the Italian workers whom he'd been arguing his whole life and working with them said they were being oppressed by the capitalists. That World War I was on the Marxist analysis supposed to be this capitalist war. And that really what should happen is that all of the workers and all of the different nations around the world should get together and overthrow their, their Marxists or their capitalist oppressors and so forth and bring about the revolution. That instead what was happening was that first and foremost in all of the Italian workers' minds was their loyalty to being Italian. They thought of themselves as part of the Italian ethnic group. and they're against the French and they're against the Germans and they're against all of the other ethnic groups. So what Mussolini realized was that this idea that economic interests come first was wrong and that it's a different collectivity that needs to be stressed.

And so what he wanted to argue is rather than international socialism that workers of the world should be uniting, what we need to do is have socialism for the Italian people. And it's going to have a different flavor than the socialism for the French people and the socialism for the German people. And that's where the label, fascism, comes from. And it's partly hearkening back to ancient Rome, where you take a bunch of rods and you bind them together with a cord. You can't bend them.

You know, any individual rod you can bend and snap pretty easily, and put a bunch of them together. So we need to come together as a collectivity. As an individual, you are part of this collectivity. You're supposed to serve this collectivity, even sacrifice yourself and die for this. collectivity, but the right collectivity is the Italian cultural group. So it's socialism for Italians, and that's what fascism is. And the same story needs to be told here. Mussolini was a very

well-read man, and he was a very articulate man. He made a living as a journalist and as an editor of a newspaper for many years. He knew the ins and outs of arguing all of the fine points of theoretical detail from his years as a Marxist. And he was working. with first-rate philosophers in Italian universities, Gentile and others who were reading Nietzsche, reading Marx, reading Hegel, reading Condits, all the same guys again, and then taking that philosophical framework, putting it through an Italian collectivist lens and outcomes, fascism, with Muslimi at the leader. So if fascism is Italian socialism, then when we go a little bit north, then what we have is Hitler and the others arguing, well, we need to have national socialism for Germans.

So they are siblings in the collectivist, socialist, nationalist, nationalist universe. Absolutely fascinating, Stephen. So coming forward to the present day, because in our culture, you know, when Brexit and Trump happened, everyone started calling everyone a Nazi and a fascist, now with COVID, vice versa. And, you know, even I jokingly as a comedian sometimes, you know, I see a later story out of Austria, you know, making vaccines mandatory. And I am sort of tempted to make the historical connection as well. So how do we, you know, everyone seems to be worried about the rise of this thing. How do we know?

Because what I'm hearing is a threat through everything you're saying is collectivism. It's all about the collective is more important than the individual. And therefore, maybe you don't have the right to take or not take the vaccine. because your body isn't quite yours as an individual. We, the collective, need you to do something very specific. What would be the tell-tale signs that Nazism or fascism is making a comeback? Yeah. Well, I would say, yeah, that's a hard question.

So I think very quickly you need to get to know the person you are labeling well as an individual. And I think just taking one data point, you know, that the person is in favor of a more authoritarian political policy on this particular issue is not enough to bring out the big gun. I think it's fair to say, you know, if someone is in favor of, say, mandatory COVID vaccinations for children before they can go into school, well, that clearly is an authoritarian measure. And the right label to use at that point is to say that is an authoritarian measure. But then to go on to say that that is a Marxist measure or a Nazi measure, or a fascist measure, that's going to then bring in a whole bunch of other baggage.

That rest of that baggage might be appropriate, but you would need to know that that particular individual advocating that particular program also signs onto, by and large, the rest of that particular program. If you don't do that, then I think you are just engaging in name-calling and doing cheap shots, and that's an intellectual irresponsibility. So it's not just, you know, fascist and Nazi and so on, you know, the same sort of accusations with respect to calling someone a sexist or calling someone a racist because, you know, their nuanced understanding of these complicated issues is slightly different from yours. That's too much cheap shot. You need to do your homework. I also do think, and this is the liberal tolerance coming out here, treat people as

individuals, not as avatars for various shadowy movements that are going on there. And just as we do in a court of law, you need to give that person a chance to explain. You need to know about the person's broader context before you start using the condemnatory language. Stephen, I remember talking to my grandfather who volunteered to fight the Nazis. And I remember when he was still alive when I was a young boy having a conversation with him, asking him, why is it that people voted for Hitler? why was it that people supported him? And he said to me, I always remember this.

He said, you have to remember, Francis, at the time that Germany was in a really bad way. Economically, Hitler was a working man's friend at the time. Is that a fair statement to make, Stephen? I think it is a fair statement to make. So, you know, when you start asking about the nature of the support for the national socialists, the same sort of dynamics that we would talk about right now in any. democratic republican political context and election is coming up and then what your party strategists do very quickly is they look at their demographics and they start dividing them into different groups and the

different groups do have different interests and things that are more or less important to them. So the Nazis did have by the time we get into the late 1920s and they're starting to get increasingly number more votes and then on into the 1930s things go up and down. until they're successful in 1933, and they get the Hitler appointed to chancellor. But it's parliamentary politics, and we have to understand it. So a lot of people are working week-to-week jobs. They are laborers, and so that's a huge demographic. And so the question of every party is putting to itself is,

how can we appeal to this demographic, appeal to their interests, and make them election promises so that they will vote for? us. And so the Nazis, to a large extent, did see themselves as economic socialists. You know, we haven't said anything yet about Gerbils, aside from the fact that he was highly educated, but he loved Karl Marx and kind of channeled Karl Marx in much. You know, his anti-capitalist money and interest is making slaves of all of us. We are friends of the workers and so on. So there's the workers, there's the teachers, there's the professors, there's the newspaper people. There are people in all different walks of life and you tailor your program to appeal to as many people as you possibly can in those groups.

So people who are workers, by which we mean shorthand-tag manual workers, whose employment prospects are somewhat uncertain. things are going up and down. Weimar Germany was up and down. Devastations obviously following World War I, vicissitudes of the market and all kinds of government controls that were going on. So it was not a stable, comfortable place to be employed. And in that context, it's very easy to say, we will give you all sorts of goodies.

And we've got scapegoats. So anytime you have a problem, these are the bad guys who are causing all of your problems. And so we should hate those people and vote them out. So the Nazis, like many other groups, were very clever at putting together a package that was appealing to many people in that subgroup for whom economic matters on a week-to-week basis are very important. What's interesting is that they saw themselves as being in direct competition or competition with the Communist Party. And if you follow, and this gets very nitty-gritty through the late part of the 1920s and on. into the early 1930. So you go into specific neighborhoods in Berlin, in Germany, in Munich,

in Hamburg, and so on. So working class neighborhoods. And what you find is in this election, in 1928, you know, 80% of the workers are voting for the communists. In the next election, those same 80% are voting for the Nazis. And then in the next election, they switch back to the communists and then to the Nazis. They're going back and forth. So they're competing for exactly the same turf and it becomes a matter of very fine detail sometimes at the level of personality politics you know this guy was caught in bed with the wrong the wrong person's wife and so we lose that particular election and so forth or we're able to sweeten the economic pot and make slightly more economic promises than these guys are in this election so they've switched over and vote for us

for us as well so i would say yes absolutely your grandfather was right economic interests do drive elections significantly. But I want to say that's not the only issue and perhaps not the most important issue. What were the most important issues that caused people to vote for Hitler and for the Nazis in 1933 and before that? Well, I think there were religious issues.

There is the long, sorted history of anti-Semitism in Germany. So whoever is most able to paint the Jews as bad people as the poison in our midst and get people riled up on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on sure matters they're going to be more successful in particular elections and that's a that's a long-standing issue. Uh, and it's also striking that if you look at the leading philosophers, I'm coming back to the philosophers again. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche to a lesser extent, they are all anti-Semitic. It's shocking to the bus raised in the liberal tradition. We read John Locke about tolerance, back in the 1690s, arguing that we should be

tolerating the Jews, right, and Adam Smith, and just becomes part of our ethos that we might disagree with them religiously and see them, their cultural habits is different from us, but they're human beings living their lives and they should have the same rights as the rest of us. You don't find that in Germany. There's a very tiny classical liberal movement there, and all the big the big names are anti-Semitic in various degrees. So that religious matters, the longstanding ethnic feuds, right? What do you think about the Russians? What do you think about the French? What do you think about the English? Do you see them, to the extent that international commerce or international politics is the dominant set of issues in this particular ethnic cycle?

You know, the same way that right now, you know, we need to be worried about the Russians or we need to be worried about the Chinese. It's easy to get that whipped up into national consciousness and get a swing vote based on that particular issue. I think it also is important is what people are reading in the newspapers. And if you've got a generation of journalists who've gone to graduated from high school and gone on to university, They absorb a certain ideological view of the world, and that comes out in their newspaper. So what are the newspaper editors deciding and so on? The other group would be, this is another shocking one when I started reading about this, is what are people learning not in universities but in primary schools?

And one of the striking things in the 1930s, slightly before the Nazis came to power, If you look at all of the teachers, teaching in primary schools all up and down Germany, and you look at their political party memberships, there were more teachers who were members of the Nazi party prior to Hitler coming to power than any other party in Germany. So it's a cultural revolution. So people are absorbing this ideology in schools. They're reading about it in their newspapers. In many cases, they're hearing it in their sermons.

and then when they have their after-dinner conversations or after-work conversations at the pub over a few beers and so on, and then the union organizers come in and they preach a certain economic message, you get it from all angles. And I think ultimately that's what shapes people. So it's not going to be one thing. It's the whole ideological package that's put together. At what point was it that Hitler decided that he needed to spread Nazism around the world? Or was that always a goal for him?

Yeah. Well, that's an interesting question. So what I would say is here, I think Hitler is channeling the great philosophers. And what you find in, I'll just cite two here is just Hegel and Marx. Hegel in the early part of the 1800s, but he becomes perhaps the dominant philosopher of the early part of the 19th century. and then Marx writing in the middle part of the 19th century, and his influence starts to be manifested more in the early part of the 20th century after the success of the revolution in Russia. But what do both of those have in common, despite the fact that they are

somewhat different in some of their metaphysics and their epistemology, some of their value frameworks, and so on? What you find in Hegel is the idea that the state is the manifestation of a kind of divine providence on earth and that through the state, all individuals need to realize their personal identity to serve the state and to be willing to be sacrificed for the state so that the state can realize its divine providential mission. And it's going to happen. Divine providence happens, no matter what you or I as individuals say. And there are certain great men who come along who are chosen by. these divine providential forces to embody the state and thereby to embody the entire culture

to bring that culture forward to the next stage. And it just so happens that Germany is, of all of the cultures around the world, the one that is most evolved, and that Germany has this providential mission to take all of the world in a certain direction. Now, that's a two-minute summary of Hegelian philosophy and political philosophy. But imagine yourself as a young, thoughtful, well-read, politically ambitious German reading Hegel. What is your inspiration going to be? Well, I want to be the embodiment of the state and to take Germany in the right direction. So all of that collectivity and a little bit of religion and might makes right at the international level all comes to be fine. And it necessarily has to be a conflictual warlike fashion that's going to

bring this, going to bring this about. So Heidegger, another German philosopher of the 1920s, Karl Schmidt, probably the most intelligent legal mind, also a PhD. All of them are reading Hegel and are arguing that Germany rather has this special, especially mission. And both of them end up being very strong supporters of national socialism and providing the intellectual and academic ammunition for it. You find the same thing in Marxism, in a more left wing or economically socialist version, right, that the whole world is in this economic clash of cultures and classes, and that it's a diehard struggle of alienation and exploitation, and it's only going to be through this violent revolution, right, that this,

manifestation of the proper way of society being organized is going to happen. And there needs to be a dictatorship of the proletariat, a small vanguard of individuals who embody their class interests and know what is best for the society as a whole who are willing to ram things through and make the revolution happen no matter how bloody that it gets. So whether you're absorbing a more right-wing Hegelian understanding or a left-wing Marxist understanding, By the time you get to these guys, that's the political zeitgeist. And I was going to ask, Stephen, we've got a few minutes left before we ask you our final question. Moving slightly beyond the Nazi specifically into the philosophical underpinnings of that,

again, coming back to collectivism and liberalism, one of the things we've explored on the show somewhat is the lack of meaning in modern society that we have. and the absence perhaps of religion, but also just the whole liberal world seems to create that sort of, you know, we are all an island of one person and somewhere. That's how it can feel sometimes to a lot of people. On the other hand, collectivism, you've just charted, you know,

the terrible ways it can lead people to think and behave. So is there some kind of golden middle or is it just classical liberalism all the way? Like, is there a good way? to organize society? Yeah. Well, I don't think there's a golden middle when you frame things that way. I'm a liberal all the way down, all the way down in the philosophy.

But you're right. I mean, it is a very good criticism of liberalism to say that fundamentally you are on your own. You are an individual. You have your life and you are a free agent. You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, what's distinctive about liberalism, though, is to say that making your life is a do-it-yourself projects. Not to say that you won't be very social and other people won't help you and you'll have wonderful support networks, right, and so forth. But there is a bottom-line responsibility that liberalism puts on each individual.

And then we do find a big divide among individuals in a liberal society, those who are great, who are energized, who are delighted by the fact that I am a free agent and I can do whatever I want with my life and I'm going to go out and do something pretty special with it versus those who feel that as a burden, as a weight, as I'm not sure that I'm up to the task and that sounds a little bit scary. And for that psychological type, I'm just going to call it a psychological type right now, I do think the collectivisms are going to be more psychologically attractive, setting aside any of the intellectuals. Because what all of the collectivisms do is to say there is a ready-made group with a ready-made set of values. And there is this set of institutions where all of it

is worked out. And all you need to do is just be part of this group. And we will provide meaning for you and give you a cause and mobilize all of your energies in a certain direction. So the idea then is for the collectivisms, it's going to be through politics and absorbing yourself into pre-existing social institutions that you are going to find meaning. And that's going to be very comforting to a large number of people. And the individuals in the liberal tradition, they're given, a lot of hard work to say you have to make your life. It's not something that you can just take off the shelf or be absorbed into. So I think that really is the great challenge for any sort of

liberal philosophy broadly conceived. It's to say that we need when we are dealing with young people to be able to raise people who are by the time they're adults, they're welcoming and able to take on that great challenge of going forth. into the world and making their own meaningful life. And I think the reason why there are so many animistic and atomistic individuals floating around in liberal society is that we've not been a very good job of that. And the way you talk about mobilizing groups

and giving groups a sense of purpose and people can identify themselves by their group, it sounds a little bit like identity politics. You know, what we see now. Yeah. Yeah. This is not a cheap shot, but this is 2021. If you were to go back to Germany in 1921, it's exactly the same thing.

Only the names have changed. It is a form of identity politics. And notice that the point here is not first and foremost political. It's what is your identity? Am I an individual? I have my own mind. inform my character and my values, and it's up to me as an individual to get up off the sofa and go out into the world and make my life into what I want it to be. That's my core identity.

Or is it the case that I, as an individual, I'm born into certain groups, and I have a ready-made individual, a ready-made identity that I can just put on like a suit of clothes. And that's who I am. and my values and my goals and what I'm supposed to do in my place in society is all worked out. That's my collectivized identity. So, you know, if you think about the ethnic versions of this, so, you know, you guys are, again, I'll use some British examples here, but, you know, you say, so part of your identity is to be British. And then you can say, you know, we are the nation of Shakespeare and John Milton. and just, you know, saying those names, you sit up a little straighter in your chair and you feel some measure of pride.

That's a point that needs to be unpacked very carefully. So was it the fact that you just happened to be born in this particular place in the world? That because other people who were born in that particular place in the world centuries ago did some amazing things, that that makes you a better person, that you don't need to do anything additional, just by virtue of being British, you are special. I think that's a danger. I think the right way to do that then is to say, yes, Shakespeare was great. John Milton was great. And why I can feel pride of that is not due to the happenstance of my birth, but I as an individual have become an educated person. And I have learned to appreciate Shakespeare and John Milton and all of the others who have done

some pretty amazing things. And so I'm the kind of person who is worthy of being related to in some way Shakespeare. So it's got to be tied to your individual achievement, not just happenstance of birth. See, it's really, really fascinating, particularly the point that Francis brings up about collectivism and collectivist ideas in modern society. And I take your point that the job of educators like you, and I'm sure you do a brilliant job. at it is to prepare people not to have to get an off-the-shelf solution. Yeah. To living a fulfilling life and making meaning for themselves.

What do we do with the fact that there's a lot of people who want the off-the-shelf thing? And that's, you know, we failed, as you say, to provide that. How do we manage that in the current political moment? Yeah. Well, I think we have to think for the long term. By the time people are 25, 30, 35, 40, and so on, they can change. They can reform, you know, people who are alcoholics or who have various kinds of addictions. They can change, but it's a rare person who does so.

And my particular interests are in university-age people, but in this last year or so, I'm doing a lot in philosophy of education and applied philosophy of education, because, you know, this is not an original point to me by any stretch, how we educate children, is the most important long-term thing. So if, for example, I've written on this, if from day one, for example, we teach children to be afraid of the world, that we're killing all of the animals

and everything is going to be poison and you probably aren't going to see age 25. If we start teaching people that at age five, then we're not going to raise a generation of people with the emotional resilience to handle important, say, environmental challenges, right? That's an indoctrination education method that sabotages people's emotional resilience. If we dumb down mathematics and science because we say it's too hard for boys or it's too hard for girls or it's too hard for members of this racial

or ethnic group, and so we do math for dummies, so to speak, at a very early age, then intellectually by the time we are graduating so-called high school graduates, we're going to be putting out millions of people who do not have the intellectual resilience in order to be able to take on the challenges of modern technological and scientific society, much less the broader intellectual project. So my view is that formal education, there are some islands of excellences in some places that are pretty good, but the average has been very low and in some cases it has been outright sabotage of young people's intellectual and emotional capacity for taking on modern living. So that's where I think we need to be focusing our education, reforming existing educational

institutions. And the one thing that I am encouraged by is the large number of people who are recognizing the low to abysmal results in much of mainstream education and who are engaging in literally thousands and thousands of different entrepreneurial experiments to try different educational models. So by the time we have this conversation, hopefully 20 years from now, we're dealing with a different young people demographic. Stephen, it's been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on the show. The hour has quite literally flown by. But we always end our interviews with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?

Well, I would just return to the point that I just made, but make it in slightly different form. I'm trying not to be one of those curmudgeonly old professors talking about kids these days. But I do notice a generational shift in the young people who show up in my university classes. And it's not just the young women, it's also the young men. By and large, it does seem that the young women are coming out of high school a little better prepared for university life than the young men are. But I'm still a little bit discouraged that we're not talking enough about what's going on in the high schools, how we are kind of minting people with a degree that to a large extent is not actually an honest. credential. There's a huge amount of dishonesty saying we give you this diploma, we send you forth,

you are ready for adult life when everybody knows that is not true. We revere educators, teachers, we've given them a huge amount of money. And there's been a certain amount of benevolence on the part of everybody to give them the benefit of the doubt on all sorts of scores. But I think we do need to have an honest reckoning about what's actually going on and a serious effort at reform. Fantastic. Stephen Hicks, thank you so much for coming back. I really recommend people check out not only the documentary that we mentioned, but also you've written a number of books, and I know you've got a couple. This is the book that came out of the documentary, so let me do a commercial plug for that one. Nietzsche and the Nazis. You came very well-prepared,

Stephen. And of course, we look forward to having you back on the show when the new books. It would be a pleasure. Let's plan on it. Thanks a lot, thanks a great question. We're going to ask you a couple of extra questions, not from us, but better ones from our local supporters. But in the meantime, we're going to say goodbye to our audience. Thank you so much for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon. We're another brilliant interview like this one or a show. All of them go at 7 p.m. UK time. And if you like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. this incredible interview.

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