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A look at the state of the world and humanity gives little cause for optimism. The historic lockdown of 11 March 2020 triggered “economic and social chaos” worldwide and was an “act of economic warfare, a war against humanity” (1). Meanwhile, we are being “afflicted” by the seventh Covid-19 wave, making it clear that “our politicians are fraudulent, complicit and incompetent” (2).

Moreover, the US West has been waging a devastating proxy war or world war against Russia (3) in Ukraine for months with the “prospect” of a “Last Judgement” (Armageddon). But it is not right to hold the “peoples” responsible for their wars; it was and is always only the ruling classes that feud and try to subjugate each other. Therefore, war cannot be attributed to human nature: Human nature is peaceful. Only the lust for power of those who function as authorities within the peoples and are imbued with the spirit of violence through their social position repeatedly leads to warlike conflicts in which the peoples bleed to death in favour of their masters and exploiters.

The psychological questioning must begin at this point and provide clarity as to why man of our time is still prepared to kill his fellow man beyond the national borders in a barbaric manner and how it becomes possible for a ruling minority to let the majority of the people live, work and die for their aims and purposes. Or to put it more precisely: How is the oppression of man by man possible?

Enlightenment thinkers emphasised freedom and equality of all people

People in the Middle Ages, who lived in a world divided into estates, still fatalistically accepted the injustices of the world and subordinated themselves to the secular and spiritual authorities without protest. It was not until the philosophy of the Renaissance and even more so that of the Enlightenment that the belief in the “innate differences” between people was shaken: domination and servitude now appeared as facts that had become historical, which could only be maintained by the naked violence of the rulers of all times.

The freedom and equality of all people were recalled again and again by the Enlightenment thinkers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the greatest among them, showed the contrast between the state of nature and social degeneracy by introducing his “Contract social” (Social Contract) with the famous words: “Man is born free, and everywhere he lies in chains.”

This doctrine gave the spirit of revolt its theoretical foundation. The discussions on the philosophy of the state eventually led to the glorious French Revolution, which declared the “rights of man and citizen” and thus laid the foundation for modern democracy.

Although the democratic idea also recorded positive developmental steps in the past, the idea of freedom is only little anchored in the consciousness of the world. Numerous countries are ruled by dictators and are subject to open or secret tyranny, the economy makes a mockery of the equality and brotherhood of all people, and to this day man has not succeeded in realising a just community order and banishing war – this age-old evil of mankind – from the world.

How is the oppression of man by man possible?

As already mentioned, the psychological question must provide us with clarity about how a ruling minority succeeds in making the majority of the people live, work and die for its aims and purposes. Or to put it more sharply: How is the oppression of man by man possible?

“Power” alone does not seem to be sufficient to keep peoples in bondage, since the power of the people would always be greater than that of their rulers, provided the citizens decided to bring that power to bear. It is ideological tools that ensure the bondage of peoples and enable rulers of all times to establish a regime of privilege and injustice: On the one hand, it is the ideological delusion of the human spirit in the sense of a confusion of the senses or a blindness of the mind that leads to making man forget his love of freedom. It even manages to make him glorify the chains under whose weight he collapses.

But beyond the mass-psychological level, the discussion of the causes of war and the domination of man over man needs an individual-psychological supplement: What mentality distinguishes “master” and “servant”? How must the soul of a member of the ruling classes be structured so that he will be willing to rule over his fellow man? What emotions must be present in the members of oppressed or exploited classes of people so that they will allow oppression to prevail over them? In order for a coherent picture to emerge, the findings of mass psychology must be rounded off by those of individual psychology.

The ideological blindness of the human spirit makes it possible, to make people forget their love of freedom

One of the most important pillars of the unjust social orders of the past and present is man’s belief that this world is only a meaningless stage of their existence and that they will find their true existence and happiness in the hereafter. For this indifference to earthly fate, the believers expected rich rewards and refrained from rebelling against tyranny. Docilely, their fatalism surrendered to every oppression and the will to live, limited by the orientation towards the hereafter, did not muster the courage or strength to revolt.

The Church, always on the side of the powerful, confirmed king and nobility as enthroned “by the grace of God”. To rise up against the conditions in state and society would therefore have been a violation of divine wisdom and providence. This transfiguration of the servant mentality created the conditions for absolutist forms of rule, in which people became a will-less tool of their authorities and gave them unreserved allegiance in war and peace.

Another moment is the national or racist ideology, whose epidemic character has been drastically illustrated to us in the past – and has recently experienced a renaissance.

The myth of the nation and the race creates an illusory unity between rulers and ruled. The ruled are supposed to believe that they belong, together with their masters, to a mysterious and glorious body in whose splendour and greatness even the least servant has his share. The servant is induced by this deception to overlook his servitude: are the others, who are not counted among his race or nation, still less than he? This makes it bearable for him that he himself counts for little or nothing. For the glory and honour of the nation, the servant was prepared to sacrifice his life.

Nationalism and race teachers are attitudes of pride and arrogance, which always include a touch of aggression against neighbouring peoples or races. Social grievances, caused by the injustice of the rulers, were and are thus always passed on to the counter-nation or counter-race.

As a slave, it did not occur to the servant to show solidarity with the slaves beyond the country’s borders in order to turn against the common oppressors. The resentment that should have arisen in him against his own tyrant was diverted to those who, like himself, groaned under the yoke of tyranny. In this diabolical mechanism lies the key to minority problems such as that of the Negroes in the USA or the Jews in Europe. The rulers of the past and present prove that they know how to exploit the “psychology of the scapegoat” to secure their rule.

Mentalities of rulers and ruled differ

The discussion of the causes of war and the domination of man over man, which has so far been conducted on the level of mass psychology, needs to be supplemented by individual psychology. In a social order that knows rulers and ruled – until today there is no other! –, two kinds of mentalities, two kinds of ideologies emerge that are essentially the same: Wherever there are upper and lower classes, mentalities of masters and servants develop.

The most salient characteristics of the type of person who grows up in a socially favoured position are the feelings of self-assurance and superiority. In this respect, children of the middle class and the working class cannot be confused. A child who is brought up in prosperity or affluence, who receives proper care and who can have a large number of desires fulfilled, assumes a different mental attitude from children of poverty, hardship or restricted economic conditions.

The child of the ruling classes approaches life with the basic mood: “The world belongs to me!”. In their dealings with servants in the parental home, they get the impression early on that people are differentiated into “masters” and “servants”, the latter being there to live and work for the rulers. Observing the relationship between father and mother in our patriarchal world leads to the child learning to associate “masculinity” at the same time with innate chosenness and a claim to dominance.

No wonder that the urge arises in his soul to be on top like the authority for once and to participate in the rule exercised by it. Under the influence of this striving for power, feelings of community are only poorly developed. In addition, a pampered upbringing produces people who face the world with a claim to chosenness and are not inclined to grant other people the same claims.

This mentality of ambition, pride and reduced fellow humanity makes it possible to become “bosses”, to take the leading positions in business, the military or politics, where the domination of man over man is envisaged. On this basis, superiors are shaped who, as politicians in agreement with representatives of big industry and militarism, are able to start a genocidal war in the interest of the ruling classes. The social structure, which is built on the spirit of violence, produces a breed of people for whom aggression means “prima et ultima ratio”.

But the servant also needs an ideology to remain in servitude. For man bears violence badly; something in him rebels against it. The use of violence arouses the desire to defend oneself, it wants to be answered by violence. Thus it is in the interest of the rulers to impart ideologies to the servant that make him resign himself to his fate. Among other things, he must believe that God or nature in their omnipotence have provided for his servitude.

The servant suffers as much from the lust for power as the master. Submissiveness acts as a constant sting that breeds a readiness for aggression. The smallest servant is still looking for someone to look down on and to vent his resentment on. This also affects the worker’s relationship with his wife and children, his “domain”.

At an early age, the working-class child feels placed in a world where there are privileged and disadvantaged people. As soon as he learns to compare clothes, financial means and social position, he develops a socially conditioned feeling of inferiority. This then gives rise to the striving to be more than the others. This can only be alleviated if the educators cultivate the idea of community so that the child learns to combine its own desire for freedom with that of other people.

Where this is not the case and an authoritarian and individualistic upbringing gives the child its first impressions of life, it will draw the conclusion from its social disadvantage that it must “raise itself up” alone. His soul, infected by the bacillus of the lust for power, will then be susceptible to racial and religious prejudices, with the help of which the social order of injustice is maintained in the past and present. The servant’s dream is not to eliminate “masters” and “servants” from the world, but he desires to become master himself. Violence has poisoned him and he no longer has the strength to dream the dream of universal freedom.

There is no doubt that the failures of the social movement are due to this psychological connection. The spokesmen of social progress suffer from the same spirit of violence that they claim to fight against. In the face of great decisions, they betrayed the idea of freedom again and again to the authority to which they remained in bondage despite bold slogans and catchwords.

Enlightenment and education

The purpose of enlightenment efforts is to purify human consciousness from the individual and collective prejudices described above. The “enlightened mind” is capable of envisaging healthy life goals. The future of our culture will largely depend on whether there will be enough “enlightened minds” capable of removing from the broad masses of people those prejudices which are the ideological background of the catastrophes of humanity.

At a time when the atomic bomb seems to make the self-destruction of humanity possible, we need free spirits more than ever to teach us what is truth and what is a lie. Intellectuals have the duty to think for other people (Romain Rolland) and to proclaim freedom in general with the freedom of thought.

More important than the Enlightenment, however, is education, which, according to Jean Paul, is the real lever of culture. Depth-psychological insight has made education clear in its immense scope. The authoritarian principle, for centuries regarded as the unquestionably valid basis of educational behaviour, already throttled people’s sense of community in their childhood years.

Today we know that through psychological educational methods we can train people who will be immune to the entanglements of power madness. By renouncing inappropriate authority and the use of violence in the parental home and school and turning to the child’s soul with true understanding, pedagogy will produce people who do not have a “subject mentality” and who will therefore no longer be docile tools for those in power in our world. Respect for the child’s personality and the friendly attitude of the educator towards his pupil will be one of the most valuable contributions to the building of a humane social order.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (specialisations: Clinical, educational, media and individual psychology). As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice in Lindau on Lake Constance. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral education in values and an education for public spirit and peace.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-covid-19-engineered-destruction-of-civil-society-prof-michel-chossudovsky/5774749

(2) https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-covid-19-crisis-and-the-seventh-wave-our-politicians-are-fraudulent-complicit-and-incompetent/5787031

(3) https://de.rt.com/international/143552-vucic-es-tobt-weltkrieg-und/

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