I think the fascist sells the idea that our feelings of weakness can be hardened into solid, rational, scientific, truths. This almost seems like… a horrible promise to a wounded man, that he could be a machine-man, and that’s the best he could ever be, and that will give him strength.
Maybe the fascist must appeal to mechanical-ism because his philosophy is fundamentally emotion-driven.
The transparent, meritocratic democracy is naturally pretty rational in the first place. The pitch is that we’re already part of a machine, and we can bend it to serve us.
World war 2 was very much not over, when he gave this speech…
> Maybe the fascist must appeal to mechanical-ism because his philosophy is fundamentally emotion-driven.
I don't feel like this is the case. Fundamentally all philosophy that has moral prescriptions is emotion-driven.
That is to say, this is the case in all philosophies that say that something "ought" (or "ought not") to be. To say that something "ought" to be a specific way, you can't just rationally and objectively look at the material world. That only tells you how things are, not how they ought to be. You have to cross Hume's Is/Ought gap at some point, and that can't be done objectively. Any philosophy that does this can be undermined by the average two year old asking "Why?" enough times.
You have to start with some fundamental moral assumptions in order to get an ought, and those are just absolutely dripping with emotion.
It is a doubly-interesting speech because he was giving a counterpoint to the idea that men should sell out their hearts and become cruel machines when it was still up in the air, whether or not that Faustian bargain would pay dividends (it didn’t work out so great for them).
Maybe the fascist must appeal to mechanical-ism because his philosophy is fundamentally emotion-driven.
The transparent, meritocratic democracy is naturally pretty rational in the first place. The pitch is that we’re already part of a machine, and we can bend it to serve us.
World war 2 was very much not over, when he gave this speech…