Gesammelte Werke

congealed division between in- and out-group. In accord with Hitler's famous description, the agitator distinguishes mercilessly between sheep and buck, those who are to be saved, the chosen ones, »we,« and those who are bad for badness's sake, who are a priori condemned and must perish, »they,« the Jews. Similarly, the fascist character is convinced that all those who belong to his own clan or group, his friends and relatives, are the right kind of people, whereas everything strange is eyed with suspicion and moralistically rejected. Thus, the moral yardstick of the agitator and his prospective follower is double-edged. Whereas both exalt conventional values and above all demand unquestioning loyalty to the in-group, they do not acknowledge moral duties toward the others. The agitator professes indignation against the governmental sentimentalists who want to send »eggs to Afghanistan,« just as the prejudiced personality has no pity for the poor and is prone to consider the unemployed as naturally lazy, as a mere burden, and the Jew as a misfit, a parasite who might as well be exterminated. The desire to exterminate is connected with ideas of dirt and filth, and goes hand in hand with the exaggerated emphasis of external physical values, such as cleanliness and neatness. On his part, the agitator endlessly denounces Jews, foreigners, and refugees as bloodsuckers and vermin. Finally, we might mention a consensus between fascist agitators and the fascist character that can be adequately explained only through depth psychology. The agitator poses as the savior of all established values and his country, but constantly dwells on dark, sinister forebodings, on »impending doom.« Corresponding traits are to be found in the make-up of the prejudiced personality who always stresses the positive, the conservative order of things, and condemns critical attitudes as destructive. However, experiments with the Murray Thematic Apperception Test have clearly shown that he displays strong destructive tendencies in his own spontaneous fantasy life. He sees evil forces at work everywhere and easily falls for all kinds of superstitions and fears of world catastrophes. As a matter of fact, he seems to long for chaotic conditions rather than for the established order in which he pretends to believe. He calls himself a conservative, but his conservatism is a sham.
    This correspondence between stimuli and patterns of reaction is of primary importance for a limited approach such as ours. It enables us to use the agitator's technique of lies as a guide for the realistic transformation of the truth principle into practice. By coping adequately with the agitator's devices, we would not merely reduce the effectiveness of his particular, and potentially highly dangerous, technique of mass manipulation; we may also come to grips with those psychological traits which prevent a large number of people from accepting the truth. On a rational level, the assertions of the agitator are so spurious, so absurd, that there must indeed be very powerful emotional reasons why he can get away with them. We may well presume that the audience somehow senses this absurdity. However, instead of being deterred by it, they seem to enjoy it. It is as though the energy of blind fury were ultimately directed against the idea of truth itself, as though the message actually relished by the audience were entirely different from its pseudofactual presentation. It is precisely this critical point at which our attack should aim.
    The psychoanalytic connotations of our discussion are obvious. To carry the truth principle beyond the level of factual statements and rational refutation – which so far proved to be ineffective or at least insufficient in this area 5 – and to translate it into terms of the subjects' own personality, would be tantamount to psychoanalysis on a mass scale. Obviously this is not feasible. In addition to the economic considerations which exclude such a method and limit it to selected cases, 6 a more intrinsic reason should be mentioned. The fascist character is not a sick person. He does not show any symptoms in the ordinary clinical sense. As a matter of fact, the
Research Project on Social Discrimination
seems to indicate that he is in many respects less neurotic and, at least superficially, better adjusted than the nonprejudiced personality. The deformations which are no doubt at the root of the prejudiced character belong to the sphere of