Article: The Gospel According to Dixon #1: Let's Be Reasonable

[Dixon]

Howdy, Deadwood!

...where might the evidence be or how would you defend this statement in a scientific or pure reasoning way? "Those whom we view as archetypes of evil, such as the Nazis, are usually not psychotic, nor purposely evil..."

Re: the "purposely evil" issue--People who embrace evil as a desirable thing and purposely pursue it are very rare. Even most people who see themselves as evil see it as something they do, not on purpose, but because they can't control themselves. Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance, was very distressed by his overwhelming impulse to kill and eat people, but couldn't control himself. This doesn't mean he wasn't evil, just not purposely so. (Here I won't get into the philosophical tangent of whether it makes any sense to call people, as opposed to their specific actions, evil or good.)

Of course, the Nazis would be in the category of those who did what they did on purpose, but didn't see it as evil. A few years ago, I saw a movie about the last days of Hitler and his cohorts in their bunker. The wife and children of one of Hitler's lieutenants were among them. When they all decided to commit suicide, the mother first killed her children, saying that she loved them and couldn't bear for them to have to live in a non-Nazi world. They thought they were making the world a better place for their children, Deadwood, just like right-wing Americans think they're doing the same thing for their children by supporting the slaughter of other people's kids in our wars of aggression. Are these people guilty of distorted thinking, tainted by nationalism, authoritarianism, etc.? Sure. Are they purposely evil? I see no reason to think that, though I'd be quite willing to hear you or someone make a case for it.

Many years ago when I was reading X-Men comics, their archenemy Magneto had a group of villains called The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. By the time the X-Men made it to the silver screen, the name of that group was changed to The Brotherhood of Mutants, dropping the "Evil", because it's generally understood that virtually nobody purposely does anything very substantially evil. And remember this, Deadwood--whatever group of people you want to believe are purposely evil--they're thinking the same thing about you.

"...They’re normal people, fundamentally like you and me, who love and fear and struggle to survive."

This is something we discover the more we learn about those who seem so different from us. That's why higher education or more exposure to people of other cultures tends to be correlated with greater tolerance--experience of "those other people" shows that they're more like us than different. If you want to make a case for some fundamental difference between WWII Germans and us..well, the burden of proof is on you. Go for it.

How would you know if Hitler was or was not psychotic? There is hardly a science that makes diagnosis a sure bet and as far as I know you are not a psychologist or psychiatrist.

My BA is in Psychology and my MA is in Counseling. I worked in Mental Health for over 20 years, working directly with hundreds, maybe thousands of psychotic people, and I did some extra study in diagnosis. The word "psychotic" refers to symptoms or disorders that involve impairment of thought, perception and/or emotions. Psychotic disorders range from Simple Paranoia to extremely debilitating multi-symptom disorders like Schizophrenia, which commonly include hallucinations (usually auditory--"voices"), bizarre delusional beliefs that aren't changeable by reasoning, loss of motivation, loss of capacity for pleasure, alienation from one's body so that they don't bathe or otherwise take care of themselves, confusion, decline in social and occupational interest/ability, etc. Most people with psychotic disorders, if unmedicated (and there weren't any antipsychotic meds in Hitler's time) are hard put to hold down a job at all, much less to rise to the top leadership position of their country. I'm not an expert on Hitler, but I've never seen the slightest indication that he had any psychotic symptoms at all, nor any reason to see psychosis as being any more prevalent in Nazi Germany than anywhere else (maybe about 2% in any society, including milder forms) or of having any role in the rise of Nazism.

Did Hitler have a personality disorder, as opposed to a psychotic disorder? I think he'd qualify for a diagnosis of "Antisocial Personality Disorder", meaning he was willing to do terrible things to others to get what he wanted, not being encumbered much, if at all, by a conscience. Does that make him different from the corrupt war criminals who run our own country, or the Wall Street criminals who own them? There is no substantial difference between the Nazi ruling class and that of the USA or most other countries, as far as I can see. Most of them are willing to start needless wars and slaughter innocents to get more money and power--or haven't you noticed? How do you think the USA was founded in the first place?

Here's an interesting question: Why are people so intent on seeing Hitler/Nazis/whatever evil bunch as crazy/psychotic in the absence of any real evidence that they are? I think we're desperate to reassure ourselves that we're radically different from them. When you live in a society based on the twin atrocities of genocide and slavery, as we do, there's a tremendous need for some evil bastard(s) upon whom to project our own darkness, the better to be in denial of it. Never mind the fact that the USA, like all the colonial countries, is based upon an even bigger and darker genocide than that committed by the Nazis--we're good in contrast to the evil Nazis; we're sane while they're psychotic; our founders (like the invader/rapist/torturer/slaver/mass murderer Christopher Columbus among many other evil fuckers) go down in history as heroes while Hitler is (appropriately) remembered as a villain, because "we" won the war and he didn't. As William F. Buckley Jr. said, "History is the polemics of the victor."

What this boils down to, Deadwood, if that if you want to present evidence that Hitler was psychotic (as opposed to being a fairly typical sociopathic national leader), that there was more psychosis among Nazis than any other group, or that the Nazis were intentionally evil, go ahead; the burden of proof is on you.

And thanks, Bro', for hanging in there with me.

[Dixon]

Hello Dixon and everyone else

Yo, Marty!

I think that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is very much alive and well in our everyday lives. Today we know the world and nature to be an uncertain place and we live our lives according to probabilities. We now know that we can never know something with absolute certainty.

Marty, I and many, many others figured out that absolute certainty is chimerical and the world's an uncertain place long before we ever heard of Heisenberg. We have records of ancient thinkers figuring that out thousands of years ago--some of the Greek philosophers, for instance. That has almost nothing to do with Heisenberg. His Uncertainty Principle is about the impossibility, even in principle, of measuring particular qualities of subatomic particles. It has nothing to do with any decisions you or I have ever made, or ever will. As I've said, we cannot know both the position and spin of a subatomic particle in my fork, but we can certainly specify (beyond any reasonable doubt) both the location and any movements of the fork itself--and neither you nor I will ever have any need to worry about the subatomic particles, so where does Heisenberg fit into our lives? Essentially nowhere.

Perhaps the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is personally important to you because you hadn't fully understood the uncertain nature of reality in our day-to-day lives until it was driven home to you by the metaphor of Heisenberg's subatomic example. I can certainly understand that. But the "principle of uncertainty" that you and I agree rules our daily lives on the human-size level does not depend on Heisenberg at all any more than relativistic time-dilation, for instance, affects our planning when we go out for a drive (at waaaaaay less than relativistic speeds).

I hope I'm not making my point too aggressively. The Heisenberg thing pushes my buttons a little sometimes because I've seen too many New Agers use wild interpretations of the Uncertainty Principle or of quantum physics to justify various wacko beliefs.

I find the world of uncertainty to be liberating, providing freedom for creativity.

Yeah! I myself have made peace with uncertainty and have even written a sort of hymn to randomness, which I will include in a column on that subject one of these months.

Thanks again for writing, Marty!

[Dixon]

I believe the [Heisenberg] Principle IS about "not knowing" and that "looking at something can change it." To use it in the service of those ideas seems more appropriate.

I agree, as long as we understand that Heisenberg's principle is specific to subatomic particles and it is only as a metaphor that it has any relevance to our daily lives on the human scale.

[podfish]

I agree, as long as we understand that Heisenberg's principle is specific to subatomic particles and it is only as a metaphor that it has any relevance to our daily lives on the human scale.

yep - although there are apparently some hints of observable quantum effects on larger-scale objects, it's by no means accepted. People have inverted the metaphor - analogies to "normal" experience are used to develop the language used in talking about physics, and they don't have to be particularly accurate analogies either. For example, particles have "color" but it isn't related to the frequency of light, they can't "spin" because they don't have an axis, and "charm" isn't an attribute, it's an object. Any flipping of the analogies back to subjective experiences ("real life") is essentially meaningless. You wouldn't particularly enjoy spending time with a charm quark any more than with a strange one - but the difference between charm & strange quarks aren't helpful to you in understanding why some people are charming and others just strange.