THE NONPOLITICAL MAN

Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called non-political man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially non-political; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a ‘legal’ manner, by mobilizing no less than five million non-voters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means ‘to be indifferent or non-political’.

If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all means rationally consistent - it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is non-political, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be non-political is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defence against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defence against consciousness of one’s social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behaviour of the broad non-political strata. In the case of the average intellectual ‘who wants nothing to do with polities’, it can easily be’ shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, He at the basis of his non-involvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. When a young female employee who would have sufficient economic reason to be conscious of her social responsibility is socially irresponsible, then in ninety-nine out of one hundred cases it is due to her so-called love story, or, to be more specific, it is due to her sexual conflicts. The same holds true for the lower middle-class woman who has to muster all her psychic forces to master her sexual situation so as not to fall to pieces altogether. Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the ‘non-political’ man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these ‘non-political’ people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. How is this to be explained? It is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist programme makes a greater impression on him than the liberal

programme, but because in his devotion to the fuhrer and the fuhrer’s ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to ‘solve’ them. Finally, this orientation enables him on occasion to see the fascists as revolutionaries and Hitler as the German Lenin. One does not have to be a psychologist to understand why the erotically provocative form of fascism offers a kind of gratification, however distorted, to a sexually frustrated lower middle-class woman who has never thought about social responsibility, or to a young salesgirl who could not arrive at social consciousness owing to an intellectual deficiency caused by sexual conflicts. One has to know the hidden life of these five million indecisive, ‘non-political’, socially suppressed men and women to understand the role that private life, that is to say essentially sexual life, plays quietly and subterranean in the hubbub of social life. This is not to be grasped statistically; nor, for that matter, are we partisans of the sham exactness offered by statistics, which bypass the real facts of life, while Hitler conquers power with his negation of statistics and by making use of the dregs of sexual misery.

The socially irresponsible man is the man absorbed in sexual conflicts. To want to make him conscious of his social responsibility by excluding sexuality, as was the case until now, is absolutely hopeless. Moreover, it is the surest way of delivering him into the hands of political reaction, which makes no bones about exploiting the consequences of his sexual misery. Upon simple calculation we see that one and only one approach is possible: the comprehension of his sexual life from a social point of view. At one time I myself would have shied away from such a conclusion, considering how banal it seems. I can understand, therefore, that the seasoned political economist will look upon such an interpretation as the brainchild of a dry, politically inexperienced, sedentary scholar. However, one who has attended sex-economic meetings knows that the overwhelming majority are people who had never attended a political meeting before. Non-affiliated and non-political men and women make up the overwhelming majority of the sex-economic organizations in western Germany. Just how presumptuous the seasoned political economists are in their judgement is most graphically proven by the fact that the international organization of mysticism has held an impressive sex-political meeting in its sense of the word in every small nest of the world at least once a week for the past thousands of years. For the Sunday meetings and rituals of the Mohammedans, Jews, etc., are nothing other than sex-political meetings. In view of the experience with sex-economic work and knowledge on the relationship between mysticism and sexual suppression that we already have, a neglect or denial of these facts constitutes an inexcusable reactionary support of the domination of middle Ages mentality and economic slavery.

Finally, I want to deal with a fact that extends far beyond the everyday task: the biologic rigidity of the human organism and its relationship to the fight for social and individual freedom.