Hitler and the NSDAP (Nazi party) are a social and historical phenomenon, Hitler’s Aspergic personality and postmodern philosophy combined to enable both his personal political success and then the postmodern power state that he constructed. By refracting the issues through leadership, psychiatric, sociological and philosophical disciplinary prisms, the hypothesis in this book proposes a synergy between Hitler's autistic leadership genius and the contemporaneously emergent radical postmodern ideas.
The collective insanity that seemed to sweep over the whole of the German nation with the Hitler phenomenon requires an additional explanation to the traditional version of the proud nation humiliated in Versailles. The extremity of the collective delusion, the racist, grandiose and murderous ideas of Hitler and the NSDAP that can emerge in small, paranoid, fanatic sects; these were adopted, embraced by, and then fought for by a whole nation, and perhaps the most educated, civilised, and cultured nation globally at that time. This phenomenon requires an explanation additional to the historical and structural accounts that currently prevail.
This book constructs such an explanation as a hypothesis; an account to bridge this conceptual gap. It argues that Hitler and the NSDAP as a phenomenon were different. Hitler and his NSDAP were not just another political party lead by another charismatic demagogue. Hitler and the NSDAP were a product of a unique moment in the cultural and philosophical evolution of human kind. Part of the tragedy of the Great War was the Generals catching up with the paradigm shift in the lethal effectiveness brought about by progress in the military technology. This thesis argues that the Hitler and NSDAP phenomenon was brought about by humanity as a whole catching up with the paradigm shift in the human condition brought about by the developments in philosophy and culture over the turn of the 19th and 20th century that later came to be known as postmodernism. Hitler and the NSDAP were able to opportunistically surf the tsunami of these new ideas as they crashed through western cultural givens and beliefs, allowing Hitler and the NSDAP to create their New Order in its wake.
Hitler was an Aspergic savant-genius in in his achievement of Chancellorship with a party that had 30 or 40 members a mere decade before; in the innovation of his political campaigns and strategies, then in his manipulation of other national leaders when he obtained a place on the world stage. On questions of values, ethics, relationships, the emotional and kinship bonds and cultural assumptions that comprises the fabric of societies and social groupings; on these issues he was an empty autistic vessel. But this was also a strength, in that he was able to reinvent a structure of ethics, value and assumptions, unencumbered by relationships, emotional ties, that would have given him pause in his pursuit of his aim.
Hitler's Asperger’s enabled him to single-mindedly pursue personal and political power. The postmodern state created did not rest on historical, religious or cultural traditions. Nietzsche’s crystallization of the previous century and a half of German idealism in a rigorous moral and cultural nihilism, could be reified and rolled out with Weberian bureaucratic and Prussian militaristic efficiency. Ideology could be shaped instrumentally in order to yield the maximal amount of the only currency that survives the caustic deconstruction of postmodernism, namely power itself
