“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.” —Rousseau
Albrecht Speer served as the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production for the German war machine. Although many of his achievements were created through propaganda, he was deeply involved with designing the Third Reich itself and participating in the Final Solution agenda. At the end of the war, Speer was charged with war crimes against humanity, including the use of slave labor. When questioned as to why he participated in the evil of Hitler’s regime, he replied: “One seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.”
Adolf Eichmann, was a powerful conspirator behind the Third Reich’s Final Solution. The problem with Eichmann is that he truly believed himself, and his actions, to be morally good. The law of Germany promoted lawlessness to the point of evil appearing as virtue. Eichmann was simply a law-abiding citizen and had no idea that the devil’s hand was laid upon the German people.
The deception lies within the confines of the human mind. Individual humans appear strong-willed, free, and independent. They are not only intelligent creatures but they are crafty and cunning, always conspiring against one another. Fate is subject to the individual and the world is theirs for the taking. However, the human mind and will is extremely pliable, even more so when they are gathered together in collectives. Humans are, and have always been, simple sheep.
Many of the greatest minds observed this phenomena, the infamous “Herd Mentality.” Soren Kierkegaard, a powerful intellectual Danish thinker, describes the majority of humans as the Mindless Masses. They do not form their own views nor beliefs, yet more importantly fail, to question the why. These people are slaves to culture. Kierkegaard’s solution to this was to become truly human. An act that completely changes not only what one thinks about, but how one thinks. This was done by becoming a disciple of the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth. Fredrick Nietzsche, on the other hand, was an existentialist and opposed religion in every form. These mindless people, he says, blindly follow authority, both religious and secular, without second thought. Not sharing the same view as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche’s answer to this condition was to either remain a blind and submissive sheep or to become the wolf.