Free Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff Page B

fact-seeking intellect, but to the feeling-ridden, action-craving “will.” “We have created our myth,” states Mussolini. “The myth is a faith, it is a passion.... Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation!” Ours, writes Rosenberg in his best-known book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, is “the myth of the blood, the belief that it is by the blood that the divine mission of man is to be defended....” 19
    The advocacy of “myth” is one form of a more general epistemological position that had come to dominate much of the philosophic world by the latter part of the nineteenth century. Thinkers for decades had been saturated with the Kantian view that facts “in themselves” are unknowable, and with the voluntarist view that action has primacy over thought. As a result, a growing chorus—helped along by Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others—began to suggest that men should dispense with any concern for facts or reality. Ideas, it was increasingly claimed, all ideas, are merely subjective tools designed to serve human purposes; if, therefore, an idea leads in action to desirable consequences, i.e., to the sorts of consequences desired by its advocates, it should be accepted as true on that ground alone, without reference to the (unknowable) facts of reality.
    This new approach reached its climax and found its enduring name in America, in the writings of William James. James called it: pragmatism. “Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need”—this, says James, is what the pragmatist dispenses with. “‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” 20
    Both Fascist and Nazi leaders embraced the new approach to truth eagerly—in their advocacy of “myth,” and in other, even more explicit forms. 21
    The standard by which ideas are to be judged, Hitler says repeatedly, is not “abstract” considerations of logic or fidelity to fact. The standard is: usefulness to the Volk. “Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge,” he writes in Mein Kampf, “must serve this purpose [”the existence and reproduction of our race and our people“]. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to its utility. Then no theory will stiffen into a dead doctrine....” 22
    What of the non-pragmatist concern for the truth, the objective truth, of an idea? “[M]any apparent [Nazi] absurdities, exaggerations or eccentricities,” writes one student of the movement,
must be ascribed neither to ignorance nor stupidity or even vindictiveness; they arise from a primary and more or less conscious disregard of objective truth. For the only function of cognition in political, and even philosophical matters as they see it is to equip the fighting nation and the leaders who mould it with the most effective weapons possible.
    “There is no such thing as truth,” explains Hitler, “either in the moral or in the scientific sense.” Or as Goebbels puts the point: “Important is not what is right but what wins.” 23
    The corollary of such an attitude is unceasing intellectual flux; pragmatism leads to relativism. An idea, the pragmatist holds, must be judged as true or false according to its utility in a particular situation. What works today, in one situation, need not work tomorrow, in another. Thus truth is mutable. There are no “rigid” principles, not in any field. There are no absolutes.
    “The needs of a state,” says Hitler, “. . . are the sole determining factor. What may be necessary today need not be so tomorrow. This is not a question of theoretical suppositions, but of practical decisions dictated by existing circumstances. Therefore, I may—nay, must—change or repudiate under changed conditions tomorrow what I consider correct today.”
    The masses,