Steve Sailer writes: My impression is that one connection between Nietzsche and Hitler was a common German fear of being poisoned, whether by miasmas, bad food, or mixed blood. For example, my Germanophone Swiss grandfather moved from Oak Park, IL to Altadena, CA in 1929 because he was a health food nut and in SoCal he could grow a lot of his own food in his garden. The proto-hippie Nature Boy movement in Southern California in the 1940s started out among long-haired sandal wearers hanging out at a German couple’s health food store in West Hollywood.
Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times: “Race-poisoning was a comparatively common obsession in the time of Hitler’s youth, rather as ecological poisoning became an obsession of many in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Comments at Steve Sailer:
* The thing about Nietzsche is that whenever he talks about Jews what he really means is the Apostle Paul. Jacob Taubes in my mind correctly points out just how envious Nietzsche was of Paul, who Nietzsche conceived of as having polemically targeted and ultimately ideologically destroyed the Roman Empire.
* Three ideas:
1. A lot of Nietzsche’s philosophy is wish-fulfillment. He wished he could have been a healthy, dashing adventurer. Instead, he was sickly his entire life, and he was meek, shy, obsequious, and utterly resentful of how strong-willed men like Richard Wagner strode all over him.
Old ladies loved keeping Nieztsche as company, because he was so sweet and polite. Meanwhile, he was writing febrile tomes about the destruction of contemporary morality and its replacement with something grander, seething with rage at countless people he’s known his life.
2. The late 19th century was an especially bad time for public health. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for air quality and environmental protection as we know it didn’t exist. Meanwhile, modern medicine was only gradually coming about, so all the old diseases of the past were rampant in big, crowded cities.
The British found, during the Boer War, that most of their citizenry was physically unable to participate in war. That’s when they understood it was time for better public health measures.
3. A lot of Nieztsche’s ideas sound crankish, but he, like his model Schopenhauer, were grappling with problems from a naturalistic worldview in its infancy. The modern methods we have for devising and testing ideas weren’t around, so they came up with numerous ideas without having the means to test them without just bloviating about them.
* Lots of biographies of notable men before 1940 note they were sick for long portions of their youth, usually with no specificity.
* Regular left liberals are high in B5 Openness, low in B5 Conscientiousness subfactor Orderliness, and are high in B5 Agreeableness subfactor Compassion.
Left Authoritarians are low in B5 Openness, high in B5 Conscientiousness subfactor Orderliness, high in B5 Agreeableness subfactor Compassion, as well as being low in IQ and high in B5 Neuroticism.
Orderliness is what is associated with high disgust sensitivity (as well as religiousness). It typically predicts right wing and authoritarian politics.
Left Wing Authoritarians seem to be very good at pushing ordinary left liberals’ Compassion button.
* The US has been since the 1960s or so, a country that promotes meritocracy. We are dedicated to giving scholarships to the underpriviledged, as well as allowing students with high SAT scores but who do not come from established and wealthy WASP families places in college. This means students coming up from the traditional lower classes are able to form connections and gain power. Many of these people are very ambitious and hard driving, and when you get enough of them gathered together, you get some strange social phenomenon.
It never seems to occur to anybody that if you give opportunities to a lot of people in the lower classes, you end up with a bunch of people at or near the top of society with all the emotional baggage of the lower classes. People are lower class not just because they don’t have money, but because they’re very disfunctional. They’re psychologically messed up and prone to mental illnesses and abberant and self-defeating behaviors. They were often raised by messed-up parents, and they can’t get over their disastrous upbringing. Many of them have lousy genes and poisonous personalities. They are often insanely jealous of anyone who had it easier. They don’t get over their psychological problems. Promote enough of these people up the social ladder and you get an entire caste of messed-up people who think the same way. They can be totally destructive to the health of a society if there are enough of them and if they are given too much power.
Think of a peasant village filled with petty resentments; jealousy of everyone else’s money, looks, brains, cool, or social connections; stupid and petty quarrels; and gossip that is constantly aimed at bringing others down whom they hate and resent (notice the resemblance to what’s being directed at Trump and his administration via the constant harping on the Russian thing?). Now make all these peasants into the aristocratic class that rules over you. You’ve got liberals in a nutshell.
It never seems to occur to anyone that scholarships and opportunities should ONLY be given to students not just with good grades, but who pass a test indicating good psychological health and emotional adjustment. There are reasons why people who are emotionally confident and privileged end up running society. They do a better job of it. They don’t get bogged down in stupid crap, and they don’t try to destroy other people because they’re jealous of those people, and they don’t have a paranoid mentally that thinks everyone is out to get them, thus causing them to hunt down and squash every speck of opposition, either ideological (notice our SJWers trying to totally control all media and public discourse,) or personal (you say anything out of line they’ll try to get you fired).
People born to privilege are confident instead of insecure, and they tend to think everyone below them likes and admires them. They usually believe in leaving people alone to live their lives as they see fit (which leads to a philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism and libertarianism), and which is the opposite of the paranoid and resentful mentality. Their confidence makes them believe that it’s normal to let everyone air their views instead of having them crushed, and this leads to greater consensus and the creation of democratic governments.
If you raise up hard-driving men from the lower classes who have a lot of emotional baggage , you can get a Joseph Stalin or a Chairman Mao, who spend their lives trying to destroy the upper classes and middle classes, because they see both as their personal oppressors, and who they’re exceedingly jealous of and angry at, and they’ll destroy anyone else who annoys them for any reason. Liberals, (and men like Stalin and Mao) never recognize their own emotional unfitness to rule. They don’t have the insight to understand that their emotional baggage makes them tyrants, not small-d democrats.