Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 2/Chapter 4
4. Personality and the Idea of the People’s State
If the racial National-Socialist State sees as its chief concern the development and preservation of the human mainstay of the state, it is not sufficient simply to foster the racial elements as such, then to educate them, and finally to prepare them for practical life; it will have also to adjust its own organization to this task.
It would be madness to judge man’s value by the race he belongs to, and consequently to declare war on the Marxist standpoint, “a man’s a man,” if one were not determined to follow through to the logical conclusion. The logical conclusion of the recognition of the importance of blood, that is of the racial basis in general, is the transfer of this evaluation to the individual person. Just as I must assess peoples differently on the basis of the race they belong to, I must assess the individual person within a national community. The fact that a people is not simply a people carries over to the individual within a national community, about in the same sense that a mind is not simply a mind, since here too the elements of blood are probably by and large the same, but are subject to a thousand delicate differentiations in detail.
The first deduction from this realization is at the same time what I may call the cruder one—the attempt to foster the elements found to be racially particularly valuable within the national community, and to take thought for their especial multiplication.
This task is the cruder one because it may be recognized and accomplished almost mechanically. It is more difficult to recognize among the total community all the intellectually and idealistically most valuable minds, and to accord them the influence that is not merely due the superior brain, but above all is useful to the nation. This winnowing according to ability and capacity cannot be mechanically undertaken; it is a labor uninterruptedly performed by the battel of daily life.
A world-concept whose effort it is, rejecting the democratic mass idea, to give the world to the best nation, that is to the highest human beings, must in logic obey the same aristocratic principle within this people, and assure to the best minds the leadership and the predominant influence in the people in question. It is thus not building upon the idea of majority, but on that of personality.
Anyone who today supposes that a racial National-Socialist state must differ from other states only purely mechanically—through better construction of its economic life, that is through a better balance of wealth and poverty, or a greater voice in the economic process for the broad masses, or by more equitable pay through the elimination of excessive wage differentials—has been caught in the merest externals, and has not the fairest notion of what we must describe as a world-concept. Everything I have just described still offers not the slightest security for permanent survival, and even less any claim to greatness. A people that got bogged in these altogether outward reforms would not thereby have the slightest guarantee of its victory in the general sruggle of the peoples. A movement that feels this sort of generally balancing and undoubtedly equitable development to be the sole substance of its mission will not in reality produce any great or any true (because deep) reform of existing conditions, since its whole activity eventually becomes entangled in superficialities, without giving the people the inner preparedness which will finally allow it to overcome, I might almost say with mechanical certainty, those weaknesses from which we suffer today.
In order more easily to understand this, it may be useful for us to glance once more at the real origins and causes of human cultural development.
The first step which visibly removed man from the animal was that of invention. Invention itself originally consisted in the discovery of ruses and stratagems whose employment made easier the fight for life against other creatures, and sometimes was the sole resource for its successful termination. These most primitive of all inventions do not reveal personalities sufficiently clearly, because naturally the later, or rather the present-day, human observer becomes conscious of them only as a mass phenomenon. There are for instance certain dodges and shrewd precautions that man may observe in animals, and that merely summarily come to his notice as a fact; and he is unable to determine or explore their origin, but simply resorts to describing such processes as “instinctive.”
In the present case this last word means nothing. Anyone who believes in a higher development of living creatures is bound to admit that every manifestation of their vital urge and their battle for life must have had a beginning at some time—that one individual must have begun it, and that this process must have been repeated more and more often, and more and more widely, until at last it became almost a part of the subconscious of all the members of a given species, and made its appearance as an instinct.
This is easier to understand and believe in the case of man. His first shrewd steps in the battle with other animals must by origin surely have been actions of particularly gifted individuals. Even here, personality was once the absolute source of decisions and conduct that were later adopted and taken for granted by the whole of mankind. In just the same way any military commonplace, today perhaps the basis of all strategy, orginally had its origin neverthless in some one particular mind, and came to be generally taken for granted only in the course of many years, perhaps of tens of centuries.
Man supplements this first inventing by a second process: he learns to put other objects, and even living creatures, to work in the struggle to preserve his own existence; and here begins the real inventive activity of man as we see it everywhere around us today. These material inventions, starting with the use of the stone as a weapon, going on to the domestication of animals, the artificial production of fire by man, and so on to the varied and admirable inventions of our day, lead us to recognize personalities as the components of such creations more and more clearly, the nearer the individual inventions are to our day, or the more significant and decisive they are. We know in any case that everything we see around us in the way of material inventions is the product of the creative vigor and ability of individual persons. And fundamentally all these inventions help to raise man higher and higher above the level of the animal world, and indeed definitely to remove him from it. Thus they serve, basically, humanity’s constant development to higher levels. But even what made life easier as a simple ruse for the man hunting in the jungle long ago helps again now, in the shape of brilliant scientific perceptions, to make mankind’s battle for its present existence easier, and to forge the weapons for the struggles of the future. In its ultimate consequences all human thinking and invention serve man’s fight for life on this planet, even if the so-called practical use of an invention or a discovery or a profound scientific insight into the nature of things may not be visible at the moment. All things together help to raise man more and more out of the class of the living creatures around him; thus they strengthen and consolidate his position so that he expands and becomes in every respect the dominating creature on earth.
All inventions, then, are the result of the work of one person. Intentionally or unintentionally all these persons are more or less great benefactors of mankind. Their work later gives tools to millions, nay thousands of millions of human beings, to make their life-struggle an easier one.
If at the origin of the present material civilization we always see individual persons as inventors, complementing one another and building each on the one before, the same thing is true of the practice and execution of the things devised and discovered by the inventors. For all the processes of production are in turn originally equivalent to inventions, and thus dependent on personalities. Even purely theoretical mental work, quite impossible to measure in detail, yet nevertheless indispensable for all further material inventions, itself appears as the exclusive product of an individual person. It is not the masses that invent, and not the majority that organizes or thinks, but always and only the individual man, the personality.
A human community cannot be considered well organized unless it is as helpful as possible in facilitating the work of these creative forces, and employing it usefully for the community. The most valuable part of the invention itself, whether material or in the world of ideas, is the inventor as a personality. To place him, then, in a position useful to the community is the first and highest concern of the organization of a national society. Indeed the organization itself should be but the carrying-out of this principle. Only thus is it released from the curse of mechanism, taking on life in its turn. In itself it must be an embodiment of the endeavor to set heads above the masses, and consequently to subordinate the latter to the heads.
Accordingly, the organization must not only not prevent the emergence of the heads from the masses, but on the contrary, through its own character it must facilitate and make this possible to the highest degree. In doing so it must go on the principle that mankind’s salvation has never been in the masses, but in its creative minds, who thus in reality must be described as the benefactors of the human race. It is to the interest of the community to assure them of the preponderant influence and to facilitate their efforts. Unquestionably these interests are not satisfied and not served by the rule of the masses (which are neither experts nor possessed of thinking power, and certainly are not Divinely endowed), but only by the leadership of those whom Nature has equipped with special talents for the purpose.
The searching-out of these minds is taken care of, as aforesaid, primarily by the hard battle of life itself. Much is broken and destroyed, thus proving it is not fated for the ultimate, and only a few appear at last as the chosen. This process of selection still goes on today in the realm of thought, of creative art, even of economic life, although in the last particularly it is already subject to severe handicaps. The administration of the state and also its power, embodied in the organized defense forces of the nation, are likewise ruled by this idea. In all these directions the idea of personality, of its authority over those below and its responsibility to the person above, still dominates. Political life alone has today entirely turned its back on this most natural of principles. While all of human civilizaion is but the result of the creative activity of persons in the entire directing body of the national community, but particularly at its head, the principle of the validity of the majority becomes the prime consideration, and, starting down from there, gradually begins to poison all of life, i. e. in reality to dissolve it. Even the destructive effect of Jewry’s activity in other national bodies is to be attributed fundamentally only to its perpetual attempts to undermine the importance of the person among its host peoples, and to put the masses in its place. But thus instead of the organizing principle of Aryan humanity, we have the destructive principle of the Jew. He thus becomes the “decomposition ferment” of peoples and races, and in a larger sense the dissolvent of human culture.
Marxism appears as the pure essence of the Jew’s attempts to eliminate the dominating importance of the personality in every field of human life, replacing it by the number of the masses. Its political counterpart is the parliamentary form of government, whose disastrous work we can see going on from the tiny nucleus of the village all the way up to the top of the government of the entire Reich; the economic counterpart is the system of a trade-union movement which serves not the real interests of the wage-earner but only the destructive purposes of the international world Jew. To whatever degree the economic system is removed from the influence of the personality principle, and surrendered instead to the action and effects of the masses, it is bound in its productive capacity to serve and be valuable to all, and must gradually become involved in inevitable retrogression. All works councils that try, instead of protecting the interests of their employes, to gain an influence on production itself, serve the same destructive purpose. They are hurtful to the total achievement, and thus, in reality, to the individual person. For the members of a body politic are satisfied in the long run not entirely by mere theoretical catchwords, but rather by the good things of daily life which fall to the individual’s lot, and by the resulting firm conviction that every achievement of a national community preserves the interests of individuals.
It makes no difference whether Marxism, on the basis of its mass theory, happens to seem capable of taking over and carrying on the existing economic structure of the moment. The soundness or fallacy of this principle is determined not by the proof of its ability to govern in the future what now exists, but only by its demonstration that it could itself create such a culture. Though Marxism were to take over and continue the present economic structure under its own leadership a thousand times over, even success in this activity would prove nothing as against the fact that Marxism would not be able, by using this principle, to create for itself what it takes over today in a finished state.
And of this Marxism has given practical proof. Not only has it nowhere succeeded in creating a civilization, or even an economic structure, but it has actually not been able to carry on existing ones according to its principles, and has had almost immediately to return by way of concessions to the ideas of the personality principle; nor can it do without these principles in its own organization.
What must fundamentally distinguish the populist world-concept from the Marxist one is the fact that it recognizes not only the value of race, but the importance of the personality, and thus makes these the pillars of its whole structure. These are the factors that carry its world-concept.
If the National-Socialist movement were not to understand the fundamental significance of this basic realization, and instead were superficially to patch up the present State, or actually to regard the mass standpoint as its own, it would really be only a party competing with Marxism; it would not on that account have a right to call itself a world-concept. If the social program of the movement consisted merely in crowding out personalities and putting the masses in their stead, that would mean the National Socialism itself was already eaten away by the poison of Marxism, just as the world of our bourgeois parties is today.
The populist state must care for the welfare of its citizens by recognizing the importance of the personality’s value in anything and everything, and thus introducing in every field that maximum of productive capacity which assures the individual of a maximum share.
Accordingly the populist State must release all leadership, but particularly the highest—that is the political—leadership, from its parliamentary principle of majority (i.e. mass) rule, unimpeachably assuring the right of personality instead.
Thence we draw the following deduction:
The best state constitution and state form is that which is most intrinsically certain to give leading importance and governing influence to the best minds of the national community.
Able men in the economic world cannot be appointed from above; they must fight their own way up. They give themselves the endless training from the smallest deal all the way through the greatest enterprise, and Life alone does the testing. Similarly, political brains cannot be suddenly “discovered.” Geniuses of an extraordinary kind permit no regard for normal humanity.
The personality principle must be anchored in the state’s organization, from the smallest nucleus of the village through the head of the government of the entire Reich.
There must be no majority decisions, but only those of responsible persons; and the word “council” must be brought back to its original meaning. Of course every man has counsellors to assist him, but one man makes the decision.
The principle which once made the Prussian army the most marvelous instrument of the German people must some day be, in a transferred sense, the basis of the upbuilding of our whole state conception: authority of every leader over those below, and responsibility toward those above.
Even then we shall not be able to do without those bodies which today are called parliaments. But their counsellors will really counsel, and only one man can have the responsibility, and he alone therefore the authority and the right to command.
Parliaments as such are necessary particularly because in them it is possible for those minds gradually to emerge that can later be entrusted with particularly responsible jobs.
The resulting general picture is as follows:
From the village up through the government of the Reich the populist state does not have a representative body which decides anything by majorities, but only advisory bodies that assist the particular chosen leader; he divides up the work among them, and at need they resume absolute responsibility in certain fields, just as the leader or chairman of the particular body has the responsibility on a larger scale.
On principle the populist state will not tolerate the practice of asking advice or judgment upon matters of a special, for instance an economic, nature from people who cannot possibly understand anything about it on the basis of their training and work.
From the outset, therefore, it divides its representative bodies into political and occupational Estate Chambers.
To assure saisfactory cooperation between the two there is always a picked special Senate above them.
No vote is ever taken in either of the Chambers or in the Senate. They are working institutions, not voting machines. The individual member has an advisory, but never a decisive, voice. This belongs solely to the particular chairman who is responsible for it.
This principle of direct connection between absloute responsibility and absolute authority will gradually evolve a picked group of leaders such as is quite unthinkable in our present age of irresponsible parliamentarism.
Thus the nation’s state constitution is brought into agreement with the law to which it already owes its greatness in the cultural and economic field.
So far as the practical applicability of these conclusions is concerned, I would ask that it be not forgotten that the parliamentary principle of democratic majority rule has by no means always held sway over mankind; on the contrary, it is to be found only in very brief periods of history, which have always been periods of the decay of peoples and states.
But of course it must not be supposed that such a transformation can be produced by purely theoretical measures from above, since logically it must not even stop with the constitution of a state, but must penetrate all other legislation, even the whole of civil life. An upheaval such as this can and will occur only through a movement which is itself built up in the spirit of these ideas, and thus bears the coming state within itself.
Hence the National-Socialist movement even today should make itself completely at home with these ideas, and put them into practical effect within its own organization, so that in the future it may not only lay down the same lines of guidance for the state, but may put at its disposal the perfected body of its own state.