/lit/ - Literature

>>11882004
>le rational man calling for the dehumanisation of "looneys" and other people for not being rational enough

also, i'm not calling for the dehumanisation of anyone or making a boilerplate argument for rationalism either. i don't think human beings are fundamentally rational, although we are capable of it. and i also don't know if the state can be governed in a purely rational form either. it probably should be, but it's complicated, as human beings are complicated. it's precisely because the holocaust is such a terrible conflation of the rational and the irrational that it warrants close study - which is to say, not beginning from a place of radical skepticism w/r/t it ever happening at all in the first place.

holocaust denial is just ridiculous. it's the same as believing in a flat earth or reptile conspiracies. it happened. to say that it didn't is silly.

but, again, the historical meaning of german nazism is an episode where peak rationalism - the tech, the infrastructure, the army, the entire interior mechanism of the German state - met up with peak irrationalism, that being the mythopoetics of nazi culture. these have deep, even primordial roots. and it resulted in war and an epochal shift in geopolitical power. had the germans not opted for the holocaust the war would, perhaps, have a different meaning; but they didn't, and moreover race theory was vitally necessary to state propaganda. there is no insoluble internal socialist clash between workers and capitalists if the state itself is enframed as being an organic unity, and with the revolution as such being exported abroad in the form of either war or internally in the form of purge. in order to sell large numbers of people on these programs you have to speak as if you know what you are talking about, but in the final analysis what you are doing is propagating a myth. and myths are powerful things, they always have been, since the beginning of time.

but people don't want myths to be rational, they want them to have a poetic power of explanation that resolves the contradictions inherent to thinking. aestheticized politics is the result.

that's a patrician request and supremely based art to go along well. i can't answer your question but i can certainly bump for taste

hope somebody else can help you find what you're looking for anon