A book* out this fall by British psychologist Dr David Lewis sheds new light on the genesis of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. How did an impoverished drifter, who never rose above the ranks of lance corporal during the First World War, ascend to a position of power that he used to lead the world into war, and unleash the holocaust?
The answer, according to Dr Lewis, lies with the controversial psychiatrist Dr Edmund Forster, who treated Hitler after the first world war not, as previously has been assumed, for blindness from mustard gas poisoning, but for hysterical blindness. This means that there was nothing physically wrong with his eyes that would prevent him from seeing, there was merely some mental block that was preventing the visual information from his eyes from reaching his conscious awareness.
Dr Forster's methods included telling patients that only by the strength of their own willpower could they recover. He hypnotised Hitler into believing in the strength of his own will, and programming him with the belief that his own inner resolve could overcome the blindness.
Once Dr Forster, an adherent of psychoanalysis, had successfully cured him of his blindness, the young Adolf was left with an ironclad faith in the power of his own will. From then on, argues Dr Lewis, Hitler's path was set. What he must do next was chillingly obvious.
Whatever the genesis of Hitler's plans, you can't argue against the fact that it was his own willpower that was the determining factor in igniting the Second World War.
Hitler's belief in his own willpower, and the apparent miracles it was capable of performing, then characterized the Nazi National Socialist party that he led. It found itself expressed in the 1934 documentary film "Triumph of the Will" by the first internationally acclaimed female director Leni Riefenstahl, who died last month. Riefenstahl's accomplished film, and the accompanying Wagnerian score lend a beauty and therefore a form of credibility to the images of the Nazi's political rally at Nuremberg.
What is this strange, primal force: willpower? And if it is so demonstrably powerful, why are most of us characterised by its exact opposite: sloth and inertia? Willpower is a hard fire to get started, but if over-kindled, its effects can be devastating.
Philosophy has debated for centuries one question more than any other: does man have free will? Science has now provided us with the answer: conscious free-will is an illusion.
To explain why I beleive this to be so, first consider the Human brain. The brain is the seat of our willpower. The Human brain is like an old house that during its lifetime has had two new sections added. At the base we find the oldest part of the brain (which is more than half a billion years old): the reptilian brain. This, in Humans, is essentially responsible for regulating the unconscious, repetitive functions of heartbeat and breathing (as well as controling levels of alertness). Surrounding our reptilian brain is the limbic system - the first extension to our house - this is the early mammalian brain and is responsible, amongst other things, for generating emotion. The newest part of our brain - the second extension - sits on top of the limbic system: the neo-cortex is where our consciousness and self-awareness appear to reside. This is the only part of our brain that knows true rationality. These three brains, each distinct chemically, functionally and physiologically, and also capable of operating independently, would have been understood by Hitler's psychiatrist in Freudian terms, as, respectively, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego.
In the 1960s, two German psychiatrists showed that when we make an action, it is possible to measure electrically our brains preparing to initiate it between 0.8 and 1.5 seconds beforehand. This in itself was of interest, but later the American neurophysiologist, Benjamin Libet, made a truly astonishing discovery: this electrical preparation signature starts before we consciously 'decide' to make the action. In other words, although we believe it is our consciousness that is deciding what actions to take and when to take them, it isn't. Its rather like a child sitting on the back seat of a car, playing with a Fisher Price toy steering wheel and imagining its movements are controlling the vehicle. We think we are in control but we aren't.
In a way this shouldn't surprise us as our conscious mind is pathetically powerless compared to the vast resources of the unconscious mind.
I would argue that our conscious brain (the neo-cortex/superego) has precious little willpower, but through repetition (the hallmark of the reptilian brain/Id) it can stir or generate the willpower of our unconscious mind. Hitler's Triumph of the Will lay in his ability to arouse the emotions (limbic system), and increase the heart-beat and breathing (reptilian brain) rate of those listening to his speeches. These clearly were not dry, logical appeals to the conscious superego, but repetitive and emotional, designed to quicken the pulse and awaken primal appetites. What this equates to is one man using the more advanced conscious part of his mind to dominate others through manipulating the more primitive unconscious parts of their minds.
Belief in the superiority of Human willpower is at the root of Humanism, Paganism (and plenty of other 'isms'), the cult of personality/celebrity worship and most of the 'New Age' movement. It is found in chanting, transcendental meditation, visualising goals, and motivational music.
Let us be clear about this: most of the time the triumph of the will is a good thing. It lets focus ourselves to get things done, and willpower is the engine behind accomplishing all constructive or good deeds.
However, investing all your trust in Human willpower is a risky business, and is essentially an amoral philosophy: who is to say that what you deem to be "good" is really for the greater good? We all have a limited perspective, and when we take as our guide our own will (rather than our conscience) we are making the, usually incorrect, assumption that we know best.
In art and in constructive creative endeavours, the triumph of the will is undoubtedly a good method. But in the management of Humans, in politics and organisations, it is more the impersonal concepts of justice, morals and practicality we must pursue. And in science it is the impersonal truth. The triumph of the will can easily poison these two areas of activity.
Both fascism and communism are based on the triumph of the will, and, as such, are basically the same thing: the direct willpower of an individual or group of "experts" over the freedom of a nation. It's the arrogant faith of the autocrat that individuals can and should be managed and moulded according to their willpower.
It is also in feminism that we see this scam at work; for the women's studies faculties and feminist pressure groups falsely use the imprimatur of scientific authority while sometimes simply making up their statistics and findings. They believe that it's worth sacrificing or warping the truth in order to further their own cause, to see their will be done. They believe that more good would come of their agenda being prosecuted than the truth being honoured. But how do they know this? How can they guess at what effects their agenda might have on other people's lives and on future generations? They can't; and their actions are based on this worst kind of Humanism: the triumph of their will. It's arrogant, and it's destructive. They consciously plot to arouse our unconscious instincts to protect women by repeating fear-arousing messages about women being raped and preyed upon/ abused by men.
Psychologist Carl Jung saw the tension's of the mid-twentieth Century - the atomic bomb, the Iron Curtain, the East/West divide - as reflective of the tension's within modern man himself; our impotent conscious minds detached from the vast powers and messages we can receive from our unconscious minds. Man, throughout the ages, has never been so alienated from himself. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has said: "In a technological age, we acquire an increasing grasp of the means to our goals, and a decreasing grasp of the reasons why we should pursue them." We know how to set goals and work towards them, but we're often totally unsure of what goals to set.
Those who use repetitive, overly emotional messages to try to bend us to their will are operating in the tradition of Hitler. We need to keep a clear head, and use science as our guiding light but morals as our master. Mankind must remain alert against the misuse of the Triumph of the Will.
* 'The man who invented Hitler', David Lewis (2003), Headline Press.