JORDAN PETERSON ON KOENIGSBERG
AND HITLER'S IDEOLOGY
I am grateful to Jordan Peterson for reading and analyzing Hitler's Ideology for his students in one of his lectures. He spends five minutes going through pages of the book, reading more than sixty separate passages (or "statements" as I call them). He is patient as he extracts the meaning of Hitler's thinking in relationship to his theory of the "behavioral immune system."
Clicking the link just below takes you to the YouTube video in which he discusses Hitler's Ideology. He presents and reads Tables directly from the book (from approximately 1:07.29 on the video-tape to 1:12.01). Click the link directly below to view the video:
The Video is from Peterson's class: 2017 Personality 20. It's a terrific presentation and I suggest you watch the video from the beginning.
I've transcribed Peterson's words from the podcast (to the best of my ability):
"How do you think and talk if you are possessed by disease metaphors? Not the speech of someone who is possessed by anxiety; this is the speech of someone who is possessed by disgust.
"It's a purification metaphor. Hitler's essential metaphor was that the nation was a pure body, a pure Ayran body that was being assaulted by parasites that were subjecting it to disease and decay. This was the fundamental metaphor that was at the bottom of his physical message.
"It wasn't a movement that was predicated on an idea. Hitler's brand of fascism wasn't a movement that was predicated on ideas, like communism. Communism is predicated on ideas. But Nazism wasn't that. It was in the realm of embodied disgust and images.
"It was more difficult to fight against from the ideological perspective. It wasn't a well-developed intellectual movement. It was an embodied movement. Hitler was extraordinarily good at using the metaphors and images and his incredible capacity for propagandistic display to fire people up at a level of analysis that they weren't aware of."
Peterson provides valuable information. However, his interpretation of Hitler, Hitler's ideas, and the impact of Hitler's ideas on Nazism and the history of the Third Reich--is incorrect. I will explain in a subsequent Newsletter.
Richard Koenigsberg
HITLER'S IDEOLOGY: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology.
Information on purchasing the eBook is here.
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