The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

"protectors of the noble and joyful," "teachers of psychic harmony and of artistic values." Homer, he says, had no
interest in the "ecstatic." Athene represented
the symbol of the life-gnawing lightning sprung from Zeus's head, the wise virgin, the protectress of the Hellenic people and its
struggle. These highly pious Greek soul creations show the straight, still pure life of Nordic man. They are, in the highest sense,
religious testimonials and the expression of confidence in one's own nature (p. 41ff.).
These gods who represent that which is pure, exalted and religious are contrasted to the gods of the Near-Eastern
peoples. "While the Greek gods were heroes of the light and the skies, the gods of the Non-Aryans of Asia Minor
showed all the traits of earthliness." Demeter and Hermes were the products of these "race souls." Dionysos, the
god of ecstasies and voluptuous pleasure, signified the "inroad of the foreign race of the Etruscans and the
beginning of the decline of Hellas."
Rosenberg, in order to support his thesis of the race soul, arbitrarily calls the gods who represent a certain aspect
of the cultural process, Greek; and others, representing a different aspect of the same Greek culture, he calls
foreign gods. The reason why Greek history was misunderstood, he says, was because historical science became
"racially prejudiced" and misinterpreted Hellenism.
[72] With pious awe, great German romanticism feels how ever darker veils are drawn over the bright gods of the heavens, and it
plunges deeply into the instinctual, the amorphous, the demoniacal, the sexual, the ecstatic, chthonic, into the adoration of the
mother [italics mine.—W.R.]. Yet it still considers all this Greek (p. 43).
Idealistic philosophies do not examine the conditions which lead to this appearance of the "ecstatic" and
"instinctual" in certain cultural epochs. Instead, they get entangled in the abstract valuation of this phenomenon.
This valuation is from the standpoint of that cultural philosophy which feels itself so exalted and above what is
"earthy" (that is, natural) that it perishes from its very exaltation. We, too, arrive at an evaluation of such
phenomena, but we derive it from the conditions of the social process which appears as the "decline" of a culture.
In this way, one recognizes the forward-driving and the inhibiting forces; one comprehends the manifestations of
the decline as a historical process; and one sights the germs of the new cultural forms which we then help to
develop. When Rosenberg, in view of the decline of the authoritarian civilization of the 20th century, points to the
fate of the ancient Greeks, he takes the side of the conservative tendencies in history, his assertions of a
"renovation" of Germany notwithstanding. We gain firm ground in our standpoint toward the cultural revolution
and its sex-economic core if we succeed in comprehending the standpoint of political reaction.
The reactionary cultural philosopher has only the alternatives of resigning and becoming skeptical or of trying to
turn back the wheel of history by "revolutionary" means. If, however, one recognizes the fact that the decline of
the old culture does not signify by any means the decline of civilization as such, but only that of a certain
civilization, the authoritarian, one arrives automatically at a different evaluation of positive and negative cultural
elements. It is a matter of finding out the revolutionary attitude toward those phenomena which the reactionary
considers symptoms of decline. It is characteristic, for example, that [73] in ethnology political reaction favors the
patriarchal theory while the revolutionary world adheres to the matriarchal theory. This divergent sociological
attitude toward historical facts corresponds to hitherto undiscovered sex-economic processes. Matriarchy—a
historically proven fact—is not only the organization of natural work democracy but also that of the sexeconomically
natural society. 2 Patriarchy, on the other hand, has not only an authoritarian economic organization,
but also a catastrophically chaotic sex-economic organization.
The church—far beyond the period of its monopolization of science—continued to keep alive the metaphysical
thesis of the "ethical nature of man," his inherent monogamy, etc. For this reason, Bachofen's findings threatened
to turn everything upside down. The amazing thing about the sexual organization of matriarchy was not its
completely different blood relationships but its natural self-regulation of sexual life. Its real basis was the absence
of private ownership of the social means of production, as shown by Morgan and Engels. Rosenberg, as a fascist