I went to college straight from Vietnam. My head was full of atrocities, though I had not personally witnessed any. I was poorly educated and quite ignorant, and my head was woefully vulnerable to the radical propaganda that was so noisy at the time. I had heard the self-promotional fabrications told by John Kerry and others to Congress in the Winter Soldier hearings. I believed the American military was systematically engaged in debauchery such as that portrayed in the popular movies that came later, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter.

I had actually begun college before I enlisted, intending to major in physics, but when I came home, believing I had been organized into perpetuating a large-scale evil, the questions that motivated me could not be answered by science. I turned to the humanities–philosophy and literature.

Since “Amerikans are Nazis” was a common sixties trope, it seemed natural to look to what happened in Germany under Hitler for understanding of how it could happen that a well-educated, cultured, and highly literate nation could be re-formed into a criminal enterprise. It would oversimplify my experience of being young and at a university with a large library and having time to study to say that I was preoccupied with understanding the rise of the Third Reich–I was not merely gathering information; I was scaling mountains and shifting my cognitive horizons and recreating my categories of consciousness–but I was also searching for clues as to what had happened in Germany by way of seeing what was happening in America.

It became a rather large project that I have not finished. The question–how did a civilized state descend so rapidly into barbarism?–should be at the center of the current age’s educational project of teaching the next generation what is most crucial for them to understand. The emergence in different cultures and different nations–Germany, Russia, China, and others–of regimes that practiced mass murder against their own citizenry using the apparatus of vast modern bureaucracies–is the big story of the last century. It is folly to ignore it or to falsify it.

I have found some answers–though of the sort that lead to more and harder questions. The most ironic thing I learned was that the radicals who spoke propaganda and stirred up mass demonstrations against the bourgeoisie order of America acted out of a political vision more similar to that of National Socialism and Marxism than to the aspirations of those they hoped to displace. They have systematically tried to blur the similarities between the political visions of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao–granting that Marxism was a leftist political philosophy while insisting that fascism was a right wing political philosophy. The effort is failing, as more and more people see the connections between early Twentieth Century American progressivism and the movements in Russia and Germany.

At a more mundane level, maybe, I also came to believe that the big important secret of how it all happened was not so mysterious or so secret at all. Most Germans who cooperated with the Nazis did so out of the careerist ambitions and insecurities that are everywhere in plain sight today. They were just obeying directives, pleasing superiors, looking for promotions and raises, protecting their jobs, and trying to get through the day. The New York Times, in the pussy-footing way it tends to deal with such stories, has taken notice of the way all those German bureaucrats did what they did, knowing they were doing it, but quite committed to their modernity and efficiency:

The economy and civil society were instrumentalized by the Nazis. Of course, many people knew what was happening to the Jews. But there was a kind of collective seduction.

The major trend in American education today is away the exploration of enduring questions from literature and history and toward instrumental thinking–how to succeed in modern bureaucracies, how to get money, how make a name for oneself. As we increasingly nationalize our schools–a process greatly advanced by Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979–our cultural pluralism leads us to increasingly ignore moral questions. We cannot agree even on the important questions, let alone the answers. Who’s to say? we say.

We curtailed religion in schools years ago, and now we increasingly direct our attention away from great books and enduring questions, focusing on using modern tools and on skills likely to further individual career success.  The de facto philosophy of public education is materialism–the universe officially has no spiritual dimension–and the de facto philosophy of American government is utilitarianism–the common good will be defined by experts and evaluated by their statistics. They will decide what sacrifices they will force us to make.

This does not mean we are becoming Nazis, of course. It does mean we have weakened our best defenses against the propaganda and widespread corruption organizers of mass movements have used to criminalize the state in the past.