Mein Kampf
life, on the one hand, and the causes of their development on the other. Only thus could I bear it all without giving up in despair. Thus it was no longer human beings who rose before me out of unhappiness and misery, out of squalor and physical degradation, but the sad products of sad laws. At the same time my own fight for life, no easier than theirs, preserved me from capitulating with pitiful sentimentality before the degraded products of this development.
No, that is not the way this is to be understood.
Even then I saw that only a two-fold path can lead to the improvement of such conditions:
A deep feeling of social responsibility for the establishing of a better basis for our development, paired with brutal determination in the destruction of incorrigible human excrescences.
Just as Nature concentrates not on preserving what exists but on breeding a new generation to perpetuate the species, so in human life we cannot be so much concerned to improve artificially what exists and is bad (which in the nature of man is a thing 99% impossible) as to assure healthier paths from the very beginning for coming development.
Even during my struggle for existence in Vienna I realized that the task of social activity can never be giddy welfare schemes, as ridiculous as they are useless, but must be the overcoming of fundamental lacks in the organization of our economic and cultural life—lacks bound to lead to perversions of individuals, or at least capable of doing so.
The difficulty of advancing with the final and most brutal weapons against a criminal class hostile to the state consists not least in uncertainty of judgment concerning the inner motives or courses of such phenomena.
This uncertainty is only too well founded in a feeling of personal guilty responsibility for such tragedies of degradation. But uncertainty cripples any serious and firm resolve, and thus helps to render vacillating (and therefore weak and half-done) even the most essential measures of self-preservation.
Only when there comes an age not haunted by the shadow
42
