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Hitler’s “Hate-Syndrome” Proves That All Hatred Is Hollow



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Bob Johnson

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2022.04.006

HITLER’S HATRED KNEW NO LIMITS—this was because he couldn’t stop believing that he was living in a type of purgatorial, make-believe world in which his childhood nightmares continually tortured him, unrelentingly. This is the “Hate-Syndrome”. He demonstrates for all to see, just how difficult it is to take revenge on someone who no longer exists. Thus he spewed out his pent-up venom on whatever, or whoever, came his way. Every time his attempts to escape this personal hell failed, as they inevitably did, he increased his atrocities, with results from which we still suffer today. Had he had a nuclear button in his final bunker, much of Europe would still be incurably radioactive, and remain so, for many thousands of years. When this happens to farmland, crops can’t grow, while famines do. Until we understand hate better, where it comes from, and how to cope with it—our future’s dead.

When Hitler was 14, his father died. So the torture he had suffered at his father’s hand should have ceased with his death. But it didn’t. Why didn’t it? That is the real challenge of “hate”. Alice Miller, in 1981, was the first to see that though torture had disappeared from his everyday reality, it nevertheless continued to afflict his mind. George Orwell too, writing in 1940, comments that Hitler had “the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs”—a precise description of the injuries his father had inflicted on him, a long time before, and from which he could, perhaps should, have recovered, but never did.

This is our most vital health challenge, made more so by our headlong pursuit of ever deadlier weapons of war. Why didn’t Hitler bring himself up to date? Why didn’t he realize that once his father was dead, he had nothing further to fear from that quarter? Neither Miller nor Orwell could resolve this anomaly, though Miller came close.

The paper has 7 parts: 1. Introduction; 2. Hate Is in the eye of the Beholder; 3. George Orwell’s Diagnosis of Hitler, in March 1940, Was Almost Perfect; 4. Hitler’s Hate-Syndrome, in His Own Words; 5. “BUT You Just Promised Not to Invade Russia—Is Nothing Sacred?”; 6. Healthier Planetary Prognoses; 7. Conclusion.

This paper illuminates a rational way through, by building on its immediate predecessor. No progress is in the least possible, until the crucial role played by blindspots is acknowledged. Sceptical readers are invited to review the practical experiment offered in the preceding paper, which proves beyond doubt, that the human eye has a retinal blindspot. Those who focus on the cross, find the circle disappears. This is a phenomenon which needs to be experienced personally—it comes as a shock. Normally we believe our eyes—they are our chief way of seeing our way through our endless problems. But here, in broad daylight, the mind fills in the gap—you cannot tell you have “made up” the “empty” space. In a significant way, your mind has deceived you into thinking there are no gaps in your visual field. Most of the time, the other eye can compensate. But the single vision test shows a deeper reality to the one you normally assume. This usually troubles us little—but when emotions inflict an equally opaque blindspot, as they did with Hitler, and invariably do with the Hate-Syndrome—then the outcome is calamitous, as he, and too many others, show.

Once his father had died, his real enemy was dead—which means that all his “enemies” thereafter were unreal. Killing them didn’t help. It couldn’t. However, if you can once introduce a more realistic perspective, by demonstrating to the afflicted individual that the battle is over, that the hatred is unreal, because obsolete—then reality can cease to be threatening. Only then does peace-of-mind, and security of society, have a chance. Hate suffocates, because it has no boundaries—or rather the boundaries it did have, are no longer operational. The challenge this paper presents is not a dry academic exercise—the Hate-Syndrome may or may not prove a useful way forwards—but if doesn’t, something else needs urgently to be put in its place, and soon—the next Hitler will be our last.

Inside Hitler’s mind, Hitler’s motivation, Hitler’s childhood, Kant’s Moral Law impugned, Free Will, is joylessness unhealthy?, William Osler’s two maxims, the three pillars of peace-of-mind

Bob Johnson. (2022). Hitler’s “Hate-Syndrome” Proves That All Hatred Is Hollow. Philosophy Study, April 2022, Vol. 12, No. 4, 231-251.