Paranoid Explanations of Human Behavior

A few excerpts from Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, The World from the Twenties to the Nineties:

“History shows us the truly amazing extent to which intelligent, well-informed and resolute men, in the pursuit of economy or in altruistic passion for disarmament, will delude themselves about realities.” 

“Like Lenin and still more like Stalin, he (Hitler) was an outstanding practitioner of the century’s most radical vice: social engineering- the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete.”

“Christianity was content with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satin. But modern secular religion faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race. Marx’s invention of the ‘bourgeoisie’ was the most comprehensive of these hate-theories and it continued to provide a foundation for all paranoid revolutionary movements… Lenin used the slogan that ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools’.  Lenin was saying that it was the entire bourgeoisie, not just Jewry, which was to blame for the ills of mankind. And it is significant that all Marxist regimes, based as they are on paranoid explanations of human behavior, degenerate sooner or later into anti-Semitism.  The new anti-Semitism, in short, was part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of individual responsibility toward the notion of collective guilt- the revival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous, even bestial, of instincts.”

“Neitzsche, always on the lookout for secular, pseudo-rational substitutes for genuine religious impulse,  …denounced these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites.. who endeavor to stir up all the bovine elements of the nations by a misuse of that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude.”