What Happens When You Can't Feel? How Fascism Gets Its Start

I  will use myself as an example. I worked in the meat-packing house when I was young. And once  a month we  played “the greased pig. “  We took a greased pig to the park and we stood around in a circle and dove on him to try to pin him down.  The winner was the guy who could pin him down for 2 minutes. It is abhorrent to me now and unthinkable and cruel. Why? Because I could not feel the effect on the poor, poor  animal. I saw but I did not see because my feelings were locked deeply away. I saw without feeling and that happened because cruelty was visited on me very early on, and due to its painful impact, I fell unconscious and could  not feel it.  I could no longer feel my own pain and therefore no one else’s. I participated in cruelty and never knew it. Herein lies the kernel of the cause of the Nazi Concentration Camps.  So the zeitgeist is all important.  It seeps into our minds like Trojan horse, stealthily, quietly and automatically. And soon we do not question anything. It took me decades to feel for those pigs, and it was far too late and now I cringe whenever I think about it. How could I do that?  I could do that because my feelings and beliefs were miles apart to keep my own pain at bay.

First, we need to dehumanize the victims; they are dangerous, threatening,  and not part of our world. The victims are not part of us. It is not that we are taught that.   It is in the  zeitgeist; we grow up with it and never question it.  It is implied in our abattoirs, the way we treat and kill animals.  Until  recently doctors operated on babies without anesthetic because they believed that they do not feel pain. And we treat “junkies”  apart, who can give up drugs if they are strong enough and make the right choice. They  can choose not to be on drugs, is the current belief. In short,  it is all in their head where choices are made; never in the body where pain lives.

How else can humans send young children to death without a second’s thought?   In the same way I allowed us all to attack a poor, lost pig and never think about its consequences.  He was just a thing to play with, not a living feeling being.

The kids were “Jews,” part of an evil empire. The leaders took away any empathy and offered a trick of the mind…..Jews.    Humanity deformed.  And they could do that in  a society already highly repressed and unfeeling. The Nazis just finished the job.  They inculcated a rationale to make killing reasonable and feasible. And for a society that was highly obedient and unquestioning it all made sense. The minute feelings push into conscious/awareness, none of that would be possible. The Nazis killed those who felt; they became the weak ones, cowards and far too sensitive,  the faint hearted who would leave Germany vulnerable. Their so called weakness was a danger to German society. They had to be eliminated. Germany above all else.

And now we begin to understand psychotherapy where we create a divide again between feelings and cognitive behavior. In a sense we are preparing a welcome, a pathway, for the evil and the Nazis to come; producing an unfeeling society who rely on beliefs, uber ales. An evil we took part in.  An evil that is the necessary consequence of a therapy that has eliminated feeling from any consideration. And when our feelings are twisted, all manor of hell can follow. They create the enemy for us and help us justify our violence toward them.  We leaders now direct our anger toward those who menace us.  Above all, those who are different from us,  especially those who think.   “When I hear the word intellectual I read for my gun,” as one Nazi leader put it. And my patients tell me that their therapists, when they hear that their patients are going to Primal Therapy,  become adamant against it, scoffing and derogatory. They won’t read about it and do not want to know about it;  it has a resonance as a  danger … with their practice and beliefs and the pivot of their lives.

We are relieved when Hubert Humphrey can go to Vietnam during the war and ask the soldiers,  “Did you get you any gooks today”?  (An exact quote). You see, they stopped being young people just married and going to school. They became “gooks.” And we can kill “gooks,” with the approval and encouragement of the vice president of the United States of America.  They were dehumanized.  I went to Vietnam and met with them after the war. They were the softest, kindest people I had met in long time.   You cannot are kill people like that.  So we made them monsters, communists who wanted to destroy us.  The story was that they were fighting not for their freedom but a proxy war for the communists, and we had to stop them.  They were “part of a giant conspiracy that threatened our very way of life.” Notice all the abstractions: vague, no proof but ideas handed down to us peasants.  Where do we go to find this great plot against us?  That is the convenience of politicians who create enemies for us; it justifies our fears and hatred.   Violence is soon in the offing.

And what happens to parents who go to psychotherapy?  They still do not see really, how they treat their children.  They cannot because intellect and cognitive processed have been apotheosized to the neglect of feelings.  That is the ultimate deformation.   Psycho--Therapy has helped us lose our humanity and compelled us to follow the leader (doctor,  head of state, the same). Psychologists reign.