In a Newsletter I distributed several hours ago, I cited "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," which defines delusion as a
false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.
Delusions are beliefs “held with great conviction in spite of little empirical support.” A delusion is a “false belief based on incorrect inferences about external reality that is firmly sustained.” A person is deluded when he holdsa particular belief with a “degree of firmness utterly unwarranted by the evidence at hand.”
Hitler and the Nazis embraced a delusion about the Jews, claiming Jews were acting to destroy the German people and civilized world, asserting Jews were bacteria or viruses. Hitler claimed that “international Jewry” stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin), uniting these leaders and their nations in a conspiracy to cause Germany to disintegrate (Herf, 2006).
The term “delusion” usually refers to a clinical syndrome associated with paranoid schizophrenia. How are we to characterize a delusion that is widespread within a society? What can we say about delusions that are embraced by large numbers of people within a culture?
Collective Delusion
Although Nazi leaders such as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were deluded regarding their beliefs about Jews (and led the German people to commit unspeakable atrocities), they are not considered clinically psychotic. Few historians describe the insane actions they generated as the manifestation of madness or insanity.
Indeed, according to the conventional psychiatric view, what these these men did could not be considered psychotic by definition. In response to my essay, “Social Madness/Collective Delusion,” a Newsletter Subscriber wrote that "Madness understood as mental illness
does not apply in situations where a substantial portion of individuals from a given group share their beliefs, no matter how irrational or fantastic or bizarre those beliefs may seem. A common belief within a group becomes a norm, and as such, the act of believing is not abnormal. Therefore the postulate that Nazis were ‘mad’ or ‘insane’ does not apply.
The Nazis subjected Jews to endless torture, gassed them en masse, incinerated them in ovens (“the Jew goes out the chimney”), used Jewish skin to make lampshades, hung them while they were compelled to salute and say, "Heil Hitler," etc.
But somehow, according to the author of the passage above, these acts cannot be considered abnormal or pathological because they occurred.
If the Nazis’ beliefs and behavior were not mad or insane, how are we to characterize the Twentieth Century characterized by repetitive episodes of war and genocide which (according to Professor Rudolph Rommel) resulted in the deaths of over 200 million people?
On the one hand, one might say that if certain forms of behavior occur with great frequency in history—however bizarre, weird or destructive these forms of behavior are—they are "normal" simply because they frequently have occurred.
Or we may consider the possibility that profound forms of psychopathology are contained--inherent--within the political or historical process. Perhaps “madness” is a central characteristic or quality of this domain. Yet we hesitate to say that political history is a place of madness or psychopathology.
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