“As the only defendant at the Nuremberg Trials to admit to his share of guilt in the crimes of the Third Reich, Speer had been sentenced to twenty years in Berlin’s Spandau jail. He was released in 1966. Some ten years later, the Canadian high school in Lahr, West Germany, which looked after the education of our children, invited Speer to speak to the student body. I was invited to the dinner that concluded the evening. I found it more than a little humorous when Speer was asked bya very confident grade eleven student: “Mr Speer, how could a group of talented people like yourself be convinced to follow a madman like Hitler?”
Speer was quiet for a few seconds, giving the impression he had never been asked the question before. Then he responded, “young lady, probably because we were all trained as engineers!. We were pragmatic to the extreme, and we thought every problem could be solved by an equation or by adjusting the numbers. Not one of us had any education in the humanities – even Hitler fancied himself an architect, in spite of his lack of formal training.“

Louis MacKenzie, Soldiers Made Me Look Good.

Well, there’s a small problem here.
While I agree with Speer about the importance of ‘humanities’ I also must notice that Marx had been another example of an individual convinced that the world can be ‘tweaked’ by following a ‘blue print’. He used the term ‘ideology’ instead but… And we cannot say that Marx was stranger to ‘humanities’.

But there’s another observation made by Speer. “We were pragmatic to the extreme”. While their ‘deficient’ education might have made Hitler’s job easier, I’m afraid it was their ‘nearsightedness’ which had been the catalyst.

It was their obsession with their immediate goal – transform the reality according to their own wishes, which had made them blind towards the future consequences of their actions.

It was not ‘humanities’ they lacked but ‘religion’.

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” is not really about what you pray to as about what you convince yourself about. That the ‘image’ you have developed about your surrounding reality is good enough to be ‘graven’. For ‘future reference’ and for it to be imposed upon others. By force if necessary.

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