EYES WIDE SHUT!

EYES WIDE SHUT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 31, 2012

A READER WRITES:

I read your take on Edward Bernays’s “The Engineering of Consent and OD.”  It is apparent you like Bernays.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I suppose the reason Edward Bernays (Engineering of Concent and OD) interested me is the same reason Gustave Le Bon, and others of the same ilk do.  OD relates to the mindset of the organization, which includes "the crowd."

For example, I've read several histories of Nazi Germany including Joachim Fest's "Hiter," and his "Speer," Alan Bullock's "Hitler," and about twenty other volumes, mainly, because it fascinates me how the crowd is energized, manipulated and ultimately directed away from its best interests. 

Now I'm set to reading "Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood" (2012), a manuscript left by Fest, who died at nearly 80 in 2006.  I'm also rereading his other books.

I'm planning to read "The Occupy Handbook" by Janet Byrne to get a better sense of that crowd moment (I can't call it a movement).

What intrigues me about "Not Me" is what the Fest family endured because it refused to be sucked into the Nazi moment.  The book is largely about the father who was a staunch German Catholic with incredible courage and unfailing perception of the Nazi betrayal of the German people and its culture.

I come from a staunch Irish Catholic family, a family with nuns and priests in the family tree, but I wonder if my family could stand up to what the Fest family did, losing their upper middle class status, their friends and forced to live in veritable poverty and isolation while surrounded by a nation of Nazi sympathizers. 

Fest doesn't see his family as heroic, but as people who held deep beliefs that couldn't be easily changed.  A quote from the nineteenth century historian Leopold von Ranks puts this in perspective:

Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments.  They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them.  But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength.  He who overcomes himself is divine.  Most see their ruin before their eyes, but they go on into it.

This is as true today when we embrace fads and panaceas at the expense of our core values and beliefs.  The sense of danger and even dread plays at the base of our reptilian brains, as we do so, but far too often it is not heeded for the mob rules, and we go into the abyss with our eyes wide shut. 

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