One of the topics that Jordan Peterson most enjoys lecturing us about is how we would have all been Nazis if we had lived in 1930s Germany. Peterson once said “I teach my students that had they been in Nazi Germany during the 1930s they would have been Nazis.” But there’s a corollary to Peterson’s logic – one that he himself dare not consider.
Peterson is an exceptionally knowledgeable psychologist and there’s little inaccurate about what he said. It’s true that human beings are social animals. As Edward Bernays wrote almost a century ago, people don’t tend to form their opinions by thinking about them, but rather by mindlessly aping authority figures.
Humans are not only social animals, we’re also herd animals. Like other herd animals, consensus is valued higher than truth. The consensus-setters are those who rule. In a state of Nature, that’s the strongest alpha male. In the modern West, it’s the invisible goverment that regiments the opinions of the masses through media control.
Media control allows the ruling class to shape the prevailing social narratives. Then, as per human nature, anyone going against any of those narratives is shunned, ridiculed and ostracised. Then the rest fall in line. In practice, it doesn’t actually matter what those narratives are. The vast majority of people will go along with any common narrative, no matter how ridiculous.
It’s an egoic delusion, Peterson loves to remind us, to think that we would have been immune to the propaganda of the 1930s, had we lived then. We are not immune to propaganda. Neither are we immune to social pressure. As such, we would have goose-stepped along with the rest of them.
Peterson is right to labour the point that the vast majority of 1930s Germans were not political philosophers, but rather just ordinary people, getting dragged along by the social currents of their time. Just like us! But then Peterson, happy to have delivered his sermon, ends it there.
The only problem with Peterson’s line of thought is that it doesn’t go far enough. There is a corollary to Peterson’s argument, one that Peterson dares not think about.
Namely: if the NSDAP had won the war, then according to Peterson’s own logic, we’d all be sitting here praising them today. If the NSDAP, and not Anglo-American capitalists, had won World War II, it would be the NSDAP setting the official moral agenda. They would control all of the world’s media. Thus, they would comprise the invisible government that shaped the world’s opinions.
If the NSDAP had won World War II and wiped the Jews out, then according to Peterson’s own logic, he himself would be telling people right now how that was the right thing to do. He himself would be lecturing people about how Nazi morality was self-evidently true as per the Will of God, and that the swastika represented order in contrast to the chaos of Marxism and Bolshevism.
Peterson might even be telling us that Hitler was the second coming of Rabbi Yeshua, the proof being that both Hitler and Rabbi Yeshua were opposed by the Jewish establishment of their time. If he did, he would be acting entirely consistently with his own admonition that, if modern people were transported back to 1930s Germany, they would be Nazis.
For him to deny this would be for him to contradict himself. It would mean that he had fallen prey to the same egoic delusion that he has been lecturing others about. In fact, psychological science tells us that had the Nazis won World War II, we would all be Nazis today. And just as globalist logic is self-evident to us today, so would Nazi logic be self-evident to us had they won.
In the same way that anyone wanting to become an academic today must deny the science of race and IQ so as to appease the globalist victors of World War II, anyone wanting to become an academic in the Nazi victory timeline would not be allowed to deny it. They would have to be a eugenicist, whether they liked it or not.
Most people, upon hearing this argument, will deny it stenuously (our morals in 2023, of course, don’t come from an invisible government but from pure reason). Hence it is described as an unthinkable corollary.
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