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3:21

(In »The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics«)

Everything that deviates from capitalism’s two human ideals – different forms of the capitalist himself as master and different forms of the factory worker as slave – is branded as an expression of psychological disease that must be remedied or, in the worst case, eliminated altogether from the social body (with Nazism’s and Stalinism’s mass purges during the 20th century as an entirely logical consequence of this reasoning). This is because capitalism’s industries not only necessitate demands for a constantly increasing level of education among the general public, but also the medical treatment of a steady stream of newly created psychopathologies as a normatively necessary practice. In their study Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno show how this constantly growing production of pathology ultimately degenerates into skull measuring and the race theories of the Nazis and the Fascists in the 20th century. Fascism and Nazism are, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, quite simply rationalism taken to its ultimate conclusion. With blind faith as a foundation, one can place on top of it any logic at all; sooner or later the result will always be socially (self-)destructive madness.