Nazis, Computers, and Critical Thought

There is a tactic that's used so unashamedly in discussions about what Hitler believed that I wonder if those employing it realize how dishonest it is at all. It is to selectively accept as true those things Hitler said which support one's preferred angle, and to dismiss those that don't with the reasoning "Well Hitler was a deceptive man and therefore we can't take everything he said at face value". This is only ever applied to those statements that one might find problematic in the course of misrepresenting the Nazi regime and what it stood for.

Hitler was not a Christian. Atheists really must stop claiming he was. It's a kneejerk defensive reaction to the fraudulent claim that he was an atheist, intended more to 'return the punch' than get at the truth.

A great deal is known about Hitler's worldview, who he studied under and the nature of his relation to the occult. He was in fact confirmed as a Catholic early in life and never excommunicated, but that's an attempt to win on a technicality and everyone involved knows it. By his own occasional confession and according to those who knew him, he was a theosophist. This is commonly ignored because few seem to know or care what theosophy is.

It's a syncretic attempt to unify all world religions with the belief that each reflects some aspect of the greater truth. It has a rich tradition of mysticism and is considered more closely related to the modern new age movement than Christianity, although in many forms it is essentially monotheistic.

That said, the vast majority of Nazis were Christians, including those who ran the concentration camps, those who policed the Jewish ghettos beforehand, and so on. This is significant because it takes the discussion beyond the simplistic "See what happens when you believe X", which has never constituted an accurate understanding of how ideology can lead to atrocity.

It is instead usually leveraged as an appeal to consequences for the purpose of gaining converts, or an attempt to shame potential converts away from a competing ideology. Instead, the discussion should be about how terrible things can happen when you switch off critical thought.

Those Christians who gladly marched as stormtroopers or gassed Jews in concentration camps or killed American soldiers did not do so because they were Christians. That would be absurd. Everything they did was contrary to Christian ideals.

No, they did it because they were credulously carrying out orders given to them by authorities that they placed their absolute uncritical trust in. This is the part of the conversation where the amiable Christian participant's frown changes to a smile; he sees an agreeable end point, a conclusion he can assent to which clears Christians and Christianity of all blame.

"Ah yes" he says, "Those innocent Christians were simply tricked by a charismatic madman". And if you're feeling polite it's fine to leave it there, but that's not the whole story, and the most important aspect hasn't yet been explored;

That uncritical trust I mentioned was gained in large part by weaving the Nazi mythos together with the Christian mythos, using Christian language to promote its goals, mixing a small dose of poison in with a large spoon full of sugar to help it go down.

When you start to speak in Christian terms, with vaguely divine authority, those Christians listening switch off their critical thinking faculties without even realizing it.

No this isn't meant as a snotty jab, yes there is real science behind it and it's something any Christian would do well to understand about themselves so they can guard against it. There are a lot of people out there looking to exploit this phenomenon for profit, I’m sure at least a few examples spring to mind.

Any ideology built on faith has this vulnerability. The very concept of faith is a sort of psychological "back door" to your brain, where ideas can slip in without passing through the filter of skepticism first.

Faith is promoted as virtuous not because it actually is, but because it's tremendously helpful if you're in the business of convincing people of claims for which there is no supporting evidence.

Most Christians, like anyone else, wouldn't haplessly believe you if you told them there's a planet of wolf men invisibly orbiting Earth, or that North Korea is secretly in talks with aliens, or that Bigfoot is all that remains of the noble Atlantean race and he telepathically communicates with you.

That’s because these are not Christian claims. They do not fit into the Christian mythos. Christians have been carefully coached growing up (or coached themselves following conversion) to have a far lower resistance to claims consistent with Christian theology (angels, souls, prayer, etc.) than any other form of supernaturalism (aliens, ghosts, psychic powers).

It is very useful to understand this vulnerability if your intention is to mobilize large numbers of people towards a goal they would otherwise not support in a nation where most are Christian.

Think of the individual member of any society as a computer. In it's default state it's almost completely unprotected against malware or viruses. A computer will credulously accept and execute any instructions you feed it regardless of whether they are malign or benign.

That includes programs which are not designed for the benefit of the user, or even for the maintenance of the computer, but for ulterior reasons; to self replicate, to spread to as many computers as possible, and to coordinate them towards the virus or malware author's original goal. The parallels should be obvious at this point and those who find them unflattering will probably stop reading. I hope not, as what follows is the most important part.

The way we prevent this is with antiviral software. It acts as a filtration mechanism that carefully scrutinizes all incoming data and denies entry to anything sketchy.

There are necessarily a lot of false positives, benign code that for whatever reason resembles malware or virii, but the end result is a computer with a far better ratio of legitimate code to malware than an unprotected computer.

In the ongoing arms race between virus/malware authors and antivirus program authors, the former have adopted a very familiar strategy. In the event that their virus or spyware does make it past a computer's defenses (usually because it had none or they were insufficient) it sets about disabling antiviral and anti-malware programs, and creating a backdoor, whereby it listens for communication from other computers similarly infected.

The irony is evident. It's created it's own selective filter, but with the reverse intent; to disable methods of protection which threaten it, and to selectively accept instructions from computers under the control of the same malign program.

Most are familiar with this concept as how "botnets" are formed. The end result is a large, discreet network of computers which largely look and act normally but which are utilized en masse and without their user's knowledge towards goals which require many, many participating computers and internet connections to achieve. Spamming, DDOSing, scams, almost exclusively profit oriented.

As I said from the outset it's not an especially flattering analogy, and as a result I expect some controversy. Some might not recognize the parallels, as they aren't accustomed to examining religious faith through a critical lens.

In that case they might find it will relieve their anxiety to simply declare it a straw man and put it out of mind as soon as possible. It's the path of least resistance, as the alternative is to struggle with an understanding of what faith amounts to in practice, and how it's used that conflicts directly with their desire to regard it as good, useful, and as legitimate a foundation for knowledge as evidence (what it has been sold to them as).

In that case I won't begrudge anyone who simply decides that they "don't recognize" this description of faith. It's probably true that they don't, and forcing cognitive dissonance on someone unreceptive to it has never been especially persuasive or endearing.