There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World

by Carlo Rovelli

The immediate ideological justification for the outbreak of brutality and violence was the self-styled racial and cultural superiority of the Germanic people, the exaltation of force, a reading of the world in terms of conflict rather than collaboration, and contempt for the “weak.” This is what I thought I would find in Mein Kampf before actually reading it. But Hitler’s book turned out to be something of a surprise, clearly showing as it does what was the real source of all this. Namely, fear. For me this came as a revelation that allowed me to grasp something about the mindset of the political right that I had always struggled to understand. A main source of the emotions that give power to the right, and above all to the far right, is not the feeling of being strong. It is, on the contrary, the fear of being weak. This fear is explicit in Mein Kampf; this feeling of inferiority, this sense of being surrounded by imminent danger.