Socrates and Hitler: Good and Evil Daemons

Socrates and Hitler: Good and Evil Daemons

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
– Isaiah 5:20

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
– Hannah Arendt

In my previous post on Socrates and His Daemon I argued for the activity and guidance of higher intelligences in our lives, daemons who connect us to our highest good. This is a wonderful and comforting thing.

However, we need to pay attention to the other side of the mirror. If you are going to be open to the possibility of dealing with good and helpful daemons, you need to be aware of the possibility of evil daemons, those whose influence cause pain, harm and destruction.

Just because an intelligent spirit is discarnate does not mean it is a truth-telling force for good. All daemons are not created equal. You need a way of distinguishing helpful and harmful forces. You need what is called discernment of spirits.

In the previous post we looked at an extreme example of the influence of a positive daemon. To balance that, I want to look at an extreme example of the influence of evil, and the distinct possibility of possession by an evil demon.

Adolf Hitler.

While we have no conclusive proof, you can make a strong case that Hitler was ridden by a very negative daemon – a devil or demon in the popular sense of the word. I want to contrast Hitler and Socrates to see the pattern that emerges of how we can distinguish good from evil.

We need to remember that Hitler did not consider himself to be evil; in fact, he viewed himself as a divinely called German Messiah of sorts. Near the end of World War I, while in a German hospital and temporarily blinded by poison gas, Hitler had his Paul-in-Damascus divine calling moment, where he realized that the evil Jews had betrayed Germany, and it was Hitler’s calling to lead Germany back to her destined greatness by exterminating the evil traitors.

Keep that in mind – Hitler was convinced he was a force of good, a divinely called Messiah.

The Demonic Hitler

This passage is from an interview of Cardinal Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI. It is from the book God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald, pp 126-127. Take into account here that Ratzinger is using the word demon in its modern sense of a being and force of evil. It is also worth keeping in mind that Ratzinger was born in 1927 and came of age in Hitler’s Germany.

That a person who had made his way up from the lowest level of society – he had loafed around not doing much of anything and had no real education – that he could set a century in motion, that he could make political decisions with demonic insight and could make people listen to him, even educated people, that is terrifying.

On the one hand, Hitler was a demonic figure. One only need read the history of the German generals, who time and again made up their minds, just for once, to tell him to his face what they really thought and who were then yet again overcome by his power of fascination that they did not dare to. But then when you look at him from up close, this same person who has a demonic fascination about him is really just a quite banal hoodlum. And finally the fact that the power of evil makes itself at home precisely in what is banal shows us something of the character traits of evil: the greater it is, the more pitiful, the smaller the element of true greatness.

In a similar way, Hitler was able to foresee demonic situations. For instance, I once read an account for how the preparations were made for Il Duce’s visit to Berlin. [Note: Il Duce is Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy.] Those who were responsible for various aspects of it made their suggestions, and after a long time he said:”No, none of that is right. I can see how it ought to go.” And in a kind of ecstasy he delivered a lecture about it, and it was all done like that. That is to say, there is some kind of demonic power that takes possession somehow, that makes what is banal great – and makes what is great appear banal – and above all makes it dangerous and destructive.

One certainly cannot say that Hitler was the devil; he was a man. But there are reliable reports by eyewitnesses that suggest he had some kind of demonic encounters, that he would say, trembling: “He was there again”, and other such things. We cannot get to the bottom of it. I believe one can see that he was taken into the demonic realm in some profound way, by the way in which he was able to wield power and by the terror, the harm, that his power inflicted.

Contrasting Socrates and Hitler

Here I want to compare and contrast Socrates and Hitler, and consider the contrast between greatness and smallness. If we look at all of these contrasts next to each other a very clear pattern emerges.

There is a kind of paradox here: Socrates, who is truly great, did not spend all his time glorifying himself, but was dedicated to his values, and respected people as individuals. Hitler glorified himself and his role, and did not respect individuals but treated people like a herd, and despised both his enemies and his followers.

Socrates valued the individual, Hitler exploited the herd, the collective.

Socrates had an explicit code of values, including truth and justice, and lived by it. Hitler had a distinct lack of clear values, and worshipped only power and coercion. Socrates valued truth, Hitler valued power.

Socrates valued thinking; Hitler did not value thinking, but reacting from feeling, instinct.

Socrates was open to other people’s ideas; Hitler was closed-minded and did not want to hear anyone or any information or news that contradicted him.

When Socrates listened to his daemon Socrates was completely aware and reasonable. When dealing with his demon Hitler was like one possessed – perhaps literally possessed – out of control, out of his mind. We have the extreme contrast here between self-awareness and complete lack of self-awareness.

When dealing with the daemon Socrates was calm, and Hitler was agitated – when Hitler spoke like one possessed in his public speeches he worked himself into a frenzy of rage where he was beside himself.

Socrates took responsibility for himself and his actions; Hitler blamed others for everything that went wrong. At the very end of his life, when it was obvious that Germany was collapsing, Hitler went into a frenzy of rage, screaming about how he had been betrayed and sold out by disloyal followers. Nothing was his fault.

There is a distinct difference in how they used language. Socrates strove for honesty and clarity. Hitler used vague and emotionally charged words, euphemisms, misleading and empty slogans.

There is an extreme contrast in how they treated others – with respect or with contempt, acting with openness and reasoning or with bullying and coercion.

I think it boils down to the difference between thought and lack of thought. Rational thought needs clarity and honesty, and honesty takes a certain amount of courage. Evil comes from a failure to think clearly, to connect thoughts, to realize what you are doing, to think through the implications of things.

The effect of the true and the good is direct, clear, and open. Evil is vague, indirect, evasive, hidden, obfuscated, confusing – and ultimately empty.

There is another distinctive difference here. In order to wield his power, Hitler needed to have an enemy to hate, to despise and to attack, and that enemy could be despised only if they were viewed as less than human. We know from conversations that Hitler talked about the Jews with a sense of uncleanness and contempt, as if they were vermin, roaches, bugs.

As soon as you decide that some people are less than human then all respect and decency is off the table and any sort of violence is justified.

Everyday Banal Evil for the Rest of Us

So far our two examples are extreme, larger than life. In this section I want to consider how this issue of good and evil daemons affects normal people rather than just exceptional cases. Especially with Hitler, he had a massive group effect on the German people. I want to consider how that could happen.

The following quotes are from a book by Hannah Arendt named, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It is a report on the very highly publicized war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. The media and the public were looking for a larger than life, obviously sinister and demonic monster to blame. Eichmann, who was basically a very competent high level middle manager who did much to orchestrate the “Final Solution” of exterminating the Jews, didn’t fit that mold at all. He was a model of a sort of petty, vague, evasive evil that thousands of other people in Germany participated in – and, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, that included many Jews.

We see a lot of the same themes we saw with Hitler, along with a distinct mindlessness, a vague and even deliberate lack of awareness and thought, and a total inability to take moral responsibility.

Note that all emphasis in bold in the following quotes is mine.

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”

“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

This lack of awareness was facilitated by Hitler’s use of language to deceive, to confuse, to change the names of things by euphemizing them so that they sounded harmless.

“The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, “normal” knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for “language rules.”

“None of the various ‘language rules,’ carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for ‘murder’ was replaced by the phrase ‘to grant a mercy death.‘ Eichmann, asked by the police examiner if the directive to avoid ‘unnecessary hardships’ was not a bit ironic, in view of the fact that the destination of these people was certain death anyhow, did not even understand the question, so firmly was it still anchored in his mind that the unforgivable sin was not to kill people but to cause unnecessary pain.”

Not murder, but Mercy Death. Who can object to Mercy Death?

“What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality—as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.”

This euphemizing of language confused issues to the point that making clear moral decisions was lost in a cloud of harmless sounding catch phrases. This did not affect just Eichmann, but also masses of the German population, what you would consider to be good, normal, caring people who went along with it. Average people – that is the point Hannah Arendt makes that is so very terrifying. They are no different than you or I. It is so easy to think that I would never have gone along with something like that if I had lived in Germany then… and how do we respond to those sort of pressures in our lives today? It is so much more comforting to think that evil is Out There and is something that applies to Them.

“And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann’s mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.”

That is part of the insidious effect of banal evil, using moral self-deception as a tool for survival. If I just don’t think too clearly about what is happening then no one can blame me, I’m not responsible. It’s not my fault.

If you had to sum up the banality of evil in one phrase, that is it – It’s not my fault.

Eichmann at the trial was noteworthy for being vague, elusive, hard to pin down, slippery. For him, and for thousands of others, their survival strategy was not just not thinking, but a deliberate not-thinking, an active not-seeing – not just not noticing, but deliberately turning away.

In the Christian tradition the devil is described as the liar and the father of lies. That is the part of the point that both Ratzinger and Arendt make: try to get to the bottom of evil and there is nothing there, it is all empty smokescreens. It is so easy; all it takes is not thinking.

If you think over the contrast of qualities between Socrates and Hitler, those are not just applicable to extreme cases. We are all faced with exactly those kinds of choices dozens of times every day, in small and large ways. Are we clear, aware, thinking things through and taking responsibility for our actions… or are we fudging it, going along with group pressure, letting it go for just this one little thing, keeping quiet because it’s safer?

Thinking this over, I want to add one other contrast between good and evil daemons from my own personal experience. A good daemon strengthens and calms the heart; an evil daemon weakens and agitates it.

Summary

I want to repeat our opening point here. If you are open to the possibility of the reality of daemons to influence our lives for good, you really need to come to terms with the possibility of there being forces of evil, demons who influence us in ways that cause suffering and destruction. You need clear and unmistakable guidelines for discernment of spirits. It is well worth emphasizing that dealing with daemons of any sort takes a high level of self-awareness, moral maturity, honesty and moral strength.

We also need to realize that you don’t have to step into a magic circle to deal with daemons, good or evil. They are part of our mental and spiritual environment all of the time, and we always have to discern and choose which voices we listen to.

Any time you refuse to clearly think, and say what you think, and take responsibility for your life and actions – any time you are bullied into keeping your mouth shut – any time you let your thought be clouded and confused by vague sounding euphemisms and slogans – you are influenced by evil, whether you care to admit it to yourself or not.

Arendt points out that there were many examples of individuals, families, small groups, who chose not to go along with the Nazi demands and paid for that with their lives. Even though the mass of people went along, there were still many individual examples of integrity and courage.

For there were individuals in Germany who from the very beginning of the regime and without ever wavering were opposed to Hitler; no one knows how many there were of them…Some of them were truly and deeply pious, like an artisan of whom I know, who preferred having his independent existence destroyed and becoming a simple worker in a factory to taking upon himself the “little formality” of entering the Nazi Party. A few still took an oath seriously and preferred, for example, to renounce an academic career rather than swear by Hitler’s name. A more numerous group were the workers, especially in Berlin, and Socialist intellectuals who tried to aid the Jews they knew. There were finally, the two peasant boys whose story is related in Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand (1953), who were drafted into the S.S. at the end of the war and refused to sign; they were sentenced to death, and on the day of their execution they wrote in their last letter to their families: “We two would rather die than burden our conscience with such terrible things. We know what the S.S. must carry out.” The position of these people, who, practically speaking, did nothing, was altogether different from that of the conspirators. Their ability to tell right from wrong had remained intact, and they never suffered a “crisis of conscience.”

The difference between the few who stood up, and the many who quietly went along, is a collective example of what Dave Rubin calls a bravery deficit – many, many people who choose not to speak out from different kinds of fear – fear of losing jobs, livelihood, friends, family, home, even losing their lives. I do not want to underestimate the hideous power of collective group pressure, how difficult it makes it to even breathe freely. Still, it is important to realize that we are no different from the people living in Nazi Germany.

…Go ahead and sign here… It’s just a formality, it doesn’t mean anything… Just put the sign up in the window; never mind if you agree with it or not. It will keep you safe; they’ll leave you alone… Sign the contract; display the sign; repeat the slogan; play the game and follow the rules. Just put the sign up in your shop window – never mind if you agree with it, that doesn’t matter. You are telling them you are on Their side, so hopefully they will leave you alone.

Do people like Socrates make a difference? Do I make a difference? Do you make a difference? Does one person really matter?

I want to close with a final quote from Hannah Arendt, citing an example of the open power of group courage and integrity. Individual people having courage and speaking up is important, and as isolated individuals they can do much.

If enough people speak up the power of individuals is additive.

The more people who find that inner integrity and live it out, the easier it makes for others to join them. Past a certain point, as illustrated in this final quote, individuals can effect the collective. We all need to remember that this work always starts with the individual before moving to larger groups. Each individual must use their own mind and find the strength in their own heart. In the final analysis, no-one else can think for us, no-one else can choose for us.

Do individuals make a difference? Ultimately the individual is the only thing that can make a difference.

Here is a final quote from Hannah Arendt about how the power of the individual can ultimately transform a group.

“The story of the Danish Jews is sui generis, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe–whether occupied, or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent. One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence… It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun; they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.”