Friday, September 22, 2023

Adolf Hitler

 

Having formal education or not has nothing to do with being a conscious person. 

Adolf Hitler was emotionally blinded by the repressed emotions of the child he once was; just like the masses that followed him. 

Society has not changed since then, and people still are emotionally blinded by the repressed emotions of the child they once were to follow dangerously repressed leaders into an abyss. Humanity is doomed.

As long people's childhood repression goes unresolved -- they will be shackled into the chains of compulsion repetition -- and it doesn't matter how well anyone articulates very nice ideas... The problem is not lack of knowledge and educated people, there are plenty of educated people with intellectual knowledge, the problem is an emotional blockage with the so-called “professionals” or “educated people” hiding behind their rationalizations and seductive theories to protect themselves from having to face and feel their own emotional pain. It takes courage to see, face and feel our painful truths, intelligence alone is not enough; but it rather helps create seductive, rationalizations, theories, illusions, and lies. 

Alice Miller explains beautifully in her book For Your Own Good: hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence page 42 and 43: "Just as in the symbiosis of the "diaper stage," there is no separation here of subject and object. If the child learns to view corporal punishment as "a necessary measure" against "wrongdoers," then as an adult he will attempt to protect himself from punishment by being obedient and will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system. In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His "will" is completely identical with that of the government.

Now that we have seen how easy it is for intellectuals in a dictatorship to be corrupted, it would be a vestige of aristocratic snobbery to think that only "the uneducated masses" are susceptible to propaganda. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation. Educators have always known this and have exploited it for their own purposes, as the following proverb suggests: "The clever person gives in, the stupid one balks." For example, we read in a work on child raising by Grünwald (1899): "I have never yet found willfulness in an intellectually advanced or exceptionally gifted child" (quoted in Rutschky). Such a child can, in later life, exhibit extraordinary acuity in criticizing the ideologies of his opponents--and in puberty even the views by his own parents-- because in these cases his intellectual powers can function without impairment. Only within a group--such as one consisting of adherents of an ideology or a theoretical school--that represents the early family situation will this person on occasion still display a naïve submissiveness and uncritical attitude that completely believe his brilliance in other situations. Here, tragically, his early dependence upon tyrannical parents is preserved, a dependence that--in keeping with the program of "poisonous pedagogy"--goes undetected. This explains why Martin Heidegger, for example, who had no trouble in breaking with traditional philosophy and leaving behind the teachers of his adolescence, was not able to see the contradictions in Hitler's ideology that should have been obvious to someone of his intelligence. He responded to this ideology with an infantile fascination and devotion that brooked no criticism.”

" . . . the anger felt by every individual person stems from the primary justified anger of the small child at the blows inflicted on it by the parents. The immediate expression of that anger is suppressed, but at a later stage this suppressed fury will be directed at innocent victims with uninhibited savagery." -- Alice Miller, "Free From Lies"

“If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.” Alice Miller  Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs page 55

“It is not true that evil, destructiveness,
and perversion inevitably form part of
human existence, no matter how often this
is maintained. But it is true that we are
daily producing more evil and, with it, an
ocean of suffering for millions that is
absolutely avoidable. When one day the
ignorance arising from childhood
repression is eliminated and humanity
has awakened, an end can be put to the
production of evil.”
— Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge, p. 143

The conversation about the effects of childhood repression in our society needs to start happening in the stage of the world, sooner rather than later, if we want to save ourselves and humanity from falling off the cliff and committing mass suicide. 


"The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person." Alice Miller -- Breaking Down the Wall of Silence page 82

“Humiliations, spankings, and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away. 

However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel leaders.

Dictators and the dynamics of cruelty
Every dictator torments his people in the same way he was tormented as a child. The humiliations inflicted on these dictators in adult life had nothing like the same influence on their actions as the emotional experiences they went through in their early years. 

Those years are “formative” in the truest sense: in this period the brain records or “encodes” emotions without (usually) being able to recall them at will. 

As almost every dictator denies his sufferings (his former total helplessness in the face of brutality) there is no way that he can truly come to terms with them. 

Instead, he will have a limitless craving for scapegoats on whom he can avenge himself for the fears and anxieties of childhood without having to re-experience those fears."

No comments:

Post a Comment