I highly suggest reading The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff.
In this book, Leonard Peikoff demonstrates the “ominous parallels” between the philosophy in pre-Hitler Germany which allowed Hitler to rise to power and the dominant philosophical trends of America today. The following is an excerpt from the book:
The mind cannot know truth, said the new philosophy. The mind dare not know itself, said the new psychology. The mind cannot understand nature, said the new physics. The mind cannot reach God, said the new theology. The mind is unspiritual and unfeeling, said the new literature. The mind stifles self-expression, said the new education. The mind is banal, said the new art.
The mind is dead, said the new culture. It cannot know reality, it cannot grasp the good, it does not move man.
Man, said the new vision, is guilty, disoriented, futile. He is a being frozen by terror, a cipher, a monster, a filthy little psychopath. The appropriate response to such a being, said
the vision’s spreaders, is pity or revulsion or an ironic yawn.
This is part of the fundamental philosophical trends which permeated pre-Hitler Germany and allowed Hitler to obtain power. Many of these very same philosophical trends are now present in dominant American philosophy and the world of academia in America.
I highly suggest reading this book. However, before reading this book, I suggest reading at leastThe Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Philosophy: Who Needs It, The Virtue of Selfishness, and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, in order to fully understand and appreciate The Ominous Parallels.
