Sometimes I've really got to shake your tree hard. Now if I can just figure out how to winkle Buck out of his hole...

You make some very good points, particularly in pointing out the nonrational, supernatural aspects of Hitler's regime. Brought to mind a series of TV specials I saw once on the mythological underpinnings of the Nazi regime (runes, artifacts, etc.) The SS symbol seen on the uniforms was apparently actually some rune.

Imperial Japan was certainly religious, as, of course, are the Muslim tyrannies and many empires of the past, but they were not the ones I was discussing at the time.

I don't know if I would qualify "nationalism" as a religion, although it possesses many of the same aspects and a number of the same fatal flaws in perception.

I haven't been very good at making myself clear on these subjects sometimes. The picture seems very clear to me at times, and the pieces of the puzzle fall into place in obvious patterns, but although I can look at an event and say, "Yes! That's another step in the wrong/right direction!" I sometimes have difficulty describing the chain of thought that leads to this. Maybe because it's less of a chain than a web, which makes my analyses start to wander and seem somewhat scattered.

One of the main reasons I post on this board is that the constant feedback helps me to clarify my thinking. Bouncing my ideas off you folks is extremely useful. Apologies if the bouncing sometimes leaves bruises. (As you might imagine, if my friends here where I live get the idea that I'm going to start talking politics or philosophy, they tend to jump through the nearest plate glass window.)

But I digress (again.)

To boil politics down to fundamentals, there will always be men whose primary desire is enslaving others. Everything else tacked on to this for justification--religion, Marxism, or any other -ism is just ribbons and bows tied on to make it look a little less bloody.

Ayn Rand thought that tyrants fell into two basic archetypes: the man of force, and the man of faith, or as she dubbed them, "Attila" and "The Witch Doctor." Her full article in which they are mentioned in the book "The New Intellectual" is worth reading. An excerpt:

...These two figures-the man of faith and the man of force -are philosophical archetypes, psychological symbols and historical reality. As philosophical archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of man and of existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic motivation of a great many men who exist in any era, culture or society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of mankind's societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason.



The essential characteristics of these two remain the same in all ages: Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man's muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem--and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.

Superficially, these two may appear to be opposites, but observe what they have in common: a consciousness held down to the perceptual method of functioning, an awareness that does not choose to extend beyond the automatic, the immediate, the given, the involuntary, which means: an animal's "epistemology" or as near to it as a human consciousness can come.



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Thinking about this also brought to mind--I'm not sure why--Jacob Bronowski in "The Ascent of Man," and his commentary at the end of the episode "Knowledge and Certainty." On the screen, Bronowski is kneeling by a pond, and lifting the mud in his hands...

It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge ofgods.



Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken'.

I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.