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“Know then thy-self, pressure not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man.”
“The idea of man, if it ever acquires a positive meaning, will be only a conjecture intended to establish connections between the disparate materials and will derive its probability only from its success.”
We live in a world in which individual freedom and basic human rights are beset by the problems of prejudice and ideology and their overt manifestations, racism, fundamentalism, and nationalism. At another more subtle level even three areas in which progress has been made, homosexual rights, feminism and equal opportunity, and the rights of the child, are developing their own ideologies, replete with their own heroes and villains. It is what Western (2015) has called the New Authoritarians, the politically correct and the incorrect sharing enjoyment via aggression, idealised identities, and the search for a new authoritarian focus.
Hitler's Nazi ideology proposed that the only law was that of the jungle, and rapaciousness its justified activity. A struggle for the riches of nature in which mercy has no place. Re-writing Genesis he saw the fall of mankind as the development of our capacity to think, and to therefore realise, that those who belong to other races could do the same, and were therefore recognisable as fellow humans (Snyder, 2015). The contrary position, which espoused the value of thought and ideas, was dismissed as weakness propagated by Jewish lies and Jewish swindle.
Such views, justifying the de-humanisation of “the other” and espousing the legitimacy of expulsion or of murderous elimination, is