The Search for a Fair Society: Why Hitler, Inspired by Ford, Hated the Jews - & Why People Teach You to Do the Same
October 14. Another week, a new chance to shine. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society.
I had reason to think about the fact that before and during WWII Japan was permeated with antisemitism. The thing was though there were no Jews in Japan, nor did most Japanese people have any contact with Jews. So, why the hate of fellow humans they had never met?
This brings me to the episode of an American journalist from The Detroit News who interviewed Hitler in December for her “Five Minutes with Men in Public Eye” series. In his office at the Nazi party headquarters in Munich, she was surprised to find a large, framed portrait of Henry Ford hanging on the wall behind Hitler’s desk. Asked about it, Hitler is reported to have said, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” He was talking about Henry Ford’s all-consuming antisemitism. The men had told his engineers to stop using brass in his cars because it was, according to him, a degraded, Jewish metal. And he spent large parts of his fortunes to publish The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in as many languages and in as large as possible numbers, even after it had been revealed as antisemitic propaganda fabricated by Czarists attempting to rally the masses against the Soviet Revolution of 1917 by claiming that secretly Jews dominated the world. Hitler read Ford’s German translation of the book while imprisoned for an attempted coup. Asked point-blank why he – Hitler – was antisemitic, he replied without hesitation, “Somebody has to be blamed for our troubles.”
Blamed for what specifically? What are those troubles? Well, people with ambitions to replace whoever is in power to grab the power for themselves – the might to push people to use a certain dataset in their individual, self-generated models of the world to profit of the forced cooperation (cooperation is only possible when the self-generated and therefore naturally diverse models are aligned to some degree) know even before they start their power grab that they will not deliver to those who use the offered dataset freely, the one thing that motivated those people using their dataset to do so. It is the one motivation all people share when it comes to cooperation and the forming of societies that are based on the partial alignment of the individual models of the world by using a shared dataset.
Using given data instead of freely chosen data, even when it accounts for just a small part of the data that goes into the generation of the personal model of the world, is a huge concession by every human. Without any external influence, we self-generate models of the world that fit our individual circumstances, circumstances including what material things happened exactly to come together in our body and how they bonded, best. As the best search engine that the material things that came together inside our body created us to be, that means to create the best models that help those material things to explore, and locate and interact with the most suitable for them energies to achieve both their lowest energy state and to continue to be in equilibrium with their surroundings. To use shared data means that the model isn’t delivering toward that goal anymore in the same way it could. Since that’s a step back, something needs to motivate us i.e. the material things inside us, something that makes this step back worthwhile because of the gain that can be made by stepping back. This gain is the high payoff random searches offer, which only become possible for the individual when their high risk - the high risk of the random searches - is offset by cooperation of a large group. The one motivation shared by all people agreeing to partially align their individual models of the world and to cooperate in a society therefore is the ability to conduct considerably more random searches than they must engage in searches that exploit existing knowledge. And that means them, personally, and not via someone else who might be enabled to conduct random searches because they engage in knowledge-exploiting searches i.e. menial labor. They must get the opportunity to develop their skills and abilities when, where and how they choose and to try out things without fear that a failure would risk their survival.
And people with ambitions to replace whoever is in power to grab the power for themselves know they can’t deliver that because they want to oversee what people do. They want to tell them what knowledge to exploit when, where and how, as these kinds of searches might be less profitable than random searches but produce their payoff reliable at a known place and time, ready to be siphoned off by them. And they want to control what knowledge anyone else has to keep them dependent and controllable.
As they can’t deliver – never planned to deliver for anyone else but themselves – they need a scapegoat, someone they can blame for their lack of success to give the people who made their ideas theirs why they supported them; someone they can make their supporters hate and fight instead of removing their support from the new leader. Jews have been used for millennia by all kind of power-seeking groups as ready-made scapegoats.
The thing is, however, people with ambitions to replace whoever is in power to grab the power for themselves will never be able to deliver once in power, so they will need ever new scapegoats to blame their lack of success on as the old ones grow old quickly. And once the obvious targets are gone, they will need to ostracize new groups marked by arbitrary characteristics and make them targets. It’s a never-ending race to the moment other people with ambitions to replace whoever is in power to grab the power for themselves have gathered a large enoughfollowing to overthrow the current regime and eplace their dataset in the world generation processes of the people with their own to force cooperation.
The only way out of the circle is not giving anyone the chance and the tools to force cooperation by forcing their dataset on even the unwilling - those doubting that this dataset will deliver them what they expect from any cooperation - but to come up with a dataset that all can agree to use because it fulfills the motivation to cooperate shared by all. And that mold fits only a fair society. One that gives everyone equal say when it comes to maintaining and adjusting the shared dataset and delivers even and foremost for the least advantaged. But also one in which everyone understands that they must actively and constantly participate in the debate and not wait until someone invites them personally.
Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never-ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
#science #history #reality #society #philosophy #WorldGeneration #fairness #information #Rawls #OriginalPosition #DifferencePrinciple #mind #self #brain #thinking #exploring
