Freud wasn’t surprised by Nazi brutality, but he struggled to comprehend how the majority of Germans, an intelligent people with a great cultural Tradition, had been seduced by a pernicious ideology. Freud smiled and said, ‘Look how poverty-stricken the poet’s imagination really is. Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has a woman fall in love with a donkey. The audience wonders at that. And now, think of it, that a nation of sixty-five million have…”
Frank Tallis: Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind
Freud’s donkey puzzle is neither new nor an exercise of mordant eloquence on his part, but is in fact a rather old political problem. Time and again, not only the intellectual elite but entire societies have fallen absurdly in love with their proverbial political donkeys. This recurring spectacle generates two confounding queries: How could so many educated minds succumb to the flagrant farce of personality cults? And why do millions eagerly march behind the lure of political personalities?
Let us first look at the intellectual elite. Many philosophers, poets, judges, business leaders, and artists rallied behind political cults, such as the cult of Franco, Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini. Few among them managed to escape the intoxicating pull of populism, a poison that seeped into even the most discerning of minds, clouding judgment and roiling reason. Some fell fatuously for the fanciful notion that the “Great Man” would serve the public good. However, most became parrots of power, reciting the Panglossian script that once their lustrous leader attained the apotheosis of power, the masses would start experiencing this as “the best of all the possible worlds.”
Upon witnessing the cavalcade of Napoleon entering the city of Jena, Friedrich Hegel reportedly said, “I saw the Emperor, this soul of the world, on horseback,” even the best intellects can, even though temporarily, be blinded by the refulgence of raw power. Arnold Toynbee met Hitler and reported to the British Government that, as Hitler desired peace, diplomacy might work, another example of wishes occluding judgment even among one of the most eminent of thinkers. Bernard Shaw met Stalin and remarked that he met “a Georgian gentleman…I have seen all the ‘terrors’ and I was terribly pleased by them.”
The renowned American poet Ezra Pound supported Mussolini during the 1930s and 1940s, believing the fascist leader embodied a path to cultural renewal of Italy. He even disseminated pro-fascist propaganda during World War II. Carl Schmitt, the lawyer-philosopher often called the “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” joined the Nazi Party and provided legal justifications for the Führerprinzip the centralization of all power in the hands of Hitler. The military and business elite eagerly rallied behind Hitler. Meanwhile, the judiciary, cloaked in robes of impartiality, rationalized and implemented the Nazi regime’s policies, ensuring that justice and reason were distorted to serve populist tyranny.
Over time, most of the intellectuals, with only a few lonely
exceptions, far from serving as beacons of reason, reflection, or resistance, and standing vigil as sentinels of truth, instead chose to become apologists for power and acted as its voluble mouthpieces. They behaved somewhat like the prelates of old: justifying, romanticizing, and sanctifying the concentration of power in the hands of potentates and princes. The shameful surrender by the aristocracy of talent of their pens at the altar of propaganda transformed them into modern intellectual mercenaries and successors to the hierophants of yore.
Let us now turn to how the unlettered millions fell in love
with their proverbial political donkeys. For them, sword and spin operated synergistically, violence and narrative, fear and fantasy. These were the twin tools used to market, embed, and thus normalize the cult ideology among millions
Bertrand Russell believed that an entire nation could be
compelled to accept vacuities through a well-organized military force. Russell’s perspective was shaped by the grisly realities of his time, where tanks and troops appeared to be the most powerful tools for various purposes, including fostering dumb delusions. Living in an era dominated by hard power, he perhaps underestimated the systematic use of emotive persuasion what we now classify as soft power, to create willing followers of inanity.
With the rise of mass politics, force remained a necessary but insufficient condition for spreading cult ideologies to millions. Leaders understood that hard power alone could not succeed, and the art of attaining and maintaining power required new strategies. Hence, the perverse persuasion of the masses became the real battlefield
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania is enchanted by a donkey
In 1932, Stalin attended a gathering at the home of Maxim
Gorky, where he addressed a group of Soviet writers. During this meeting, he famously called writers “the engineers of the human soul” a phrase often attributed to Stalin himself, though he borrowed it from others. Stalin is said to have remarked that “the production of souls” was more important than the production of tanks, thus delineating the role of the intellectual elite in manipulating millions through propaganda.
Thus emerged the modern spin-doctors—the so-called
“engineers of the human soul.” Once the intellectual elite joined hands with their Great Men, it became easier to sell the cult spin to millions. Rather than questioning the beguiling of the masses, the educated segment of society choreographed it—trading truth for access and conscience for comfort. They marketed myths of apocalyptic doom, reconstructive nostalgia, selective amnesia, and fantastical futures, all wrapped in a hypnotic refrain: our leader is the benevolent benefactor sent to guide us to salvation. This psychological chicanery marched alongside the old methodology of gangs, guns, and gulags. In the age of mass politics, sword and spin worked in tandem to instill the love of proverbial political donkeys among millions.
