"One of the most disturbing facts that came out
in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him
perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it
disturbing.
If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their
leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense
easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced,"
unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his
administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was
thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for
law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He
served his government very well.
He was not bothered much by guilt. I
have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he
slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. True, when he visited
Auschwitz, the Camp Commandant, Hoess, in a spirit of sly deviltry, tried to
tease the big boss and scare him with some of the sight, Eichmann was disturbed,
yes. He was disturbed. Even Himmler had been disturbed, and had gone weak at the
knees. Perhaps, in the same way, the general manager of a big steel mill might
be disturbed if an accident took place while he happened to be somewhere in the
plant. But of course what happened at Auschwitz was not an accident: just the
routine unpleasantness of the daily task. One must shoulder the burden of daily
monotonous work for the Fatherland. Yes, one must suffer discomfort and even
nausea from unpleasant sights and sounds. It all comes under the heading of
duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience. Eichmann was devoted to duty. and proud of
his job.
The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a
sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and
understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it
from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is
precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.
It is the sane ones,
the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the
missile, and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of
destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared What makes us so sure, after
all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the
first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will he suspect. The sane ones will keep
them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have
perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot.
They will he obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of
command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the
missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.
We can no longer assume
that because a man is "sane" he is therefore in his "right mind." The whole
concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is
itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in the limited sense that he is not
impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to
the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can
be perfectly "adjusted." God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly
adjusted even in hell itself.
And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of
a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destrtoys
our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their
sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one's
own? Evidently this is not necessary for "sanity" at all. It is a religious
notion, a spiritual notion, a Christian notion What business have we to equate
"sanity" with "Christianity"? None at all, obviously. The worst error is to
imagine that a Christian must try to be "sane" like everybody else, that we
belong in our kind of society. That we must be "realistic" about it. We must
develop a sane Christianity: and there have been plenty of sane Christians in
the past. Torture is nothing new, is it? We ought to be able to rationalize a
little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear war, or at least
for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us are doing our best
along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their
sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can
even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist
Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and the rest. These words
have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely and cleverly in the
past....
No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides,
in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire
cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic
bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next
war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and
chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The
ones who coolly estimate how many millions of victims can he considered
expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink
blots too. On the other hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the
ban-the-bomb people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little
crazy.
I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an
end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge
bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more
doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps
there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane ...
perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be
totally without anxiety, totally 'sane.' "
--Thomas Merton
Barbara Hartwell Percival
Legal Defense & Research Trust
Legal Defense & Research Trust
Barbara
Hartwell Vs. CIA