The Forbidden Ethics

Oath of the Horatii, Jacques-Louis David, 1784; stresses the importance of patriotism and self-sacrifice for one's country.

The Will of Sacrifice

The will is the thing itself, the inner content, the essence of the world, a blind and incessant impulse.

― Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer saw something more horrible than any philosopher had ever witnessed. He saw the reality for what it was: “The will is raging, blind, naked, suffocating, it is destined to destroy the very individuals it wishes to exist.” His philosophy can be summed up in the following words: Will Strife Misery. The tragedy of life arises from the nature of the will; as each individual living striving to continue to exist, the world becomes a vast field of incalculable fights and struggles. This cruel, rapacious and ruthless conflict invariably generates much misery. All happiness and gratification, the mere abolition of a desire and extinction of a pain, expires as soon as our appetite has been satisfied. Suffering always endures: “life is an expiation for the crime of being born.” For Schopenhauer, life is a curse, and the only hope of liberation is death. 

Charles Darwin established an atrociously competitive and pessimistic world where living creatures struggle with others for their own preservation. Animals are preyed on by other animals, and people are preyed on by other people: “Man is a wolf to his fellow men” (homo homini lupus est). However, how to explain a mother's tender care for her cubs, coming to defend them at the cost of her own life? How to explain the “altruistic” behavior of animals, of sacrificing their lives to preserve the herd? How can you explain the heroic sacrifice so many people have made for their family, people, and nation?

Blood is the answer. Genetically related individuals sense the union in their blood, and by this virtue, they can overcome their individual interest towards preserving their kin. In certain circumstances, they even sacrifice themselves. In the same way, the weakest and sickest are often sacrificed. In nature, it is observed that mothers tend to abandon or eat the weakest and most deformed member of their offspring. Although at first glance it would seem like a cold and cruel behavior; it has the same purpose as self-sacrifice, to ensure that the best specimen grows up to inherit the best genes for survival.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw in the instincts of living beings a force that went beyond the mere impulse to survive and reproduce, as established by Darwinism. The Will is proactive, not reactive; organisms not only adapt to their environment but seek to dominate it and empower their species. He rejects Schopenhauer's nihilistic pessimism; it is desire (conatus) that gives meaning to existence. Every individual has a natural right to exist, and a natural right to grow in strength and power. In other words, if you cannot turn the Will against itself, as Schopenhauer suggested, you better embrace it (amor fati). To Live is to Struggle. The Will becomes a necessary and positive characteristic since it is the inner force that can transform human beings, allowing them to no longer be reactive to circumstances but proactive, capable of controlling their own destiny: the Will to Power. 

Lycurgus and Sparta

The Legendary Lycurgus, Lawgiver of Sparta.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Living creatures lack moral notions; they only need to distinguish what is convenient for them to survive in the environment. Consequently, such terms, good and bad, are based on what is useful for existence, like power, health, youth and happiness. Everything that does not limit the Will to Power. Spartan society was the main exponent of a moral that goes beyond good and evil. Lycurgus, considered the Father of Sparta, observed from his childhood that men acted for personal glory; blood brothers killed each other for individual goals. Lycurgus consecrated himself body and soul to a single purpose, to unify his people, where each individual was capable of sacrificing himself entirely in pursuit of the majority: “the species is everything, the individual nothing”. 

After coming to power, he convinced the greedy to abandon their desires for wealth to unify with the will of the whole. Lycurgus wanted to turn the Spartans into something more than warriors; superior human beings. Therefore, there was no room for those with genetic defects. If a newborn suffered from serious defects, he was thrown over the cliff of Mount Taygetos. Only those healthy enough to become worthy hoplites could live. For a Spartan, life was found in power and strength; the elimination of the deformed or sick was considered a noble act to avoid a life full of limitation and suffering, both for themselves and their families. The goal was to create the strongest, healthiest and smartest people.

In the agogé, children were taught to endure all kinds of hardships and to enter adolescence through a particular initiation in the wild, the krypteia, that tested their ability to endure and overcome pain to instill their fighting spirit. Disloyalty to blood, people, family, comrade and the immutable laws of morals, decency and chivalry were unforgivable. The State demanded total fidelity to the racial community. After the Spartan people had sworn Lycurgus’ laws, he decided to leave his homeland and committed suicide. A man who was born for a specific purpose no longer has to remain tied to the Earth once that purpose has been fulfilled. This is what euthanasia consists of, a word of Greek origin that precisely means “good death” and represents the perfect counterpart of eugenics or “good birth”.

The Common Good before the individual Good

Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814) by Jacques-Louis David. Sacrifice immortalizes the hero, death forges his legend, achieving immortality in his legacy.

You cannot get a wise man out of a hundred fools, and a heroic decision cannot come out of a hundred cowards.

― Adolf Hitler

The warriors tend to be thought of as aggressive barbarians with tendencies towards conflict, but their origins are not oriented to destructive warfare but to a committed service to a cause that ennobles and dignifies. It corresponded to a path of ethical conditions that allowed them to possess a heroic transcendence. For a samurai, life was closely related to bushido, a set of principles to fight without losing humanity. Faced with the loss of virtue, they practised seppuku, a ritual suicide, to restore lost honor. A samurai aspired to die at his peak, in the battlefield, and not grow old and “wither”, as a cherry blossom does not wither.

According to Carl Schmith, in the tragedy of human life, conflict is inevitable; there is always an urge for war, an enemy to be found. The idea of a common enemy gives the members of a political community a purpose in life. For Schmitt, heroic transcendence is defined on the battlefield, by the ability to kill his enemies for the sake of his comrades or die at the hands of his enemies for the sake of his comrades. Freedom is defined as denying cowardice in the phase of imminent death. It was Schopenhauer who wrote: “A happy life is impos­si­ble; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.”

The Spartan hoplite fought side by side with his comrades, in dense lines of spears and shields, in a loud and frontal encounter with their enemies. The hoplitic tactic demanded collective heroism and not individual courage, a fight in which one had to resist on a firm footing. The shield, which protects the neighboring comrade, was an essential factor. “Come back with the shield or on the shield”, the Spartan mothers said when they said goodbye to their children. That is: come back victorious or dead.

The Spartan hoplites knew how to be worthy of their fame on multiple occasions. The most famous event courted in 480 BC; King Leonidas and hoplites perished facing the immense Persian army in Thermopylae, fighting to the last man. They willingly sacrifice themselves in defense of the Greek Homeland, stripped of all personal selfishness. They went beyond death and heroism to achieve something else; apotheosis; immortality.

The National Socialist Ethics

Prometheus, by Arno Breker: “I aspire towards the divine, the perfect human being”.

We showed what an historical race is, and how, its character once formed, it possesses, as the result of the laws of heredity such power that its believes, institutions, and arts ― in a word, all the elements of its civilization― are merely the outward expression of its genius.

― Gustave Le Bon

For Nietzsche, God is dead. And because God is dead, it is man who must be responsible for his own evolution. The Gobinian idealization of the Aryan race, together with Nietzsche's exaltation of master morality, allowed the ideal of the Übermensch to emerge on the intellectual horizon of Germany. The moral system of National Socialism was derived from the following axiom: What is morally correct is eugenic since it improves the living conditions of the human being. What is morally bad is dysgenetic, that is, it degrades life and allows the generation of the Untermensch (subhuman). 

Slave morality, promoted by Judeo-Christianity, ruined Western Civilization by imposing pessimistic and egalitarian values, which proceeded to the terrain of “racial decadence.” Oswald Spengler wrote: “Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism”. Both egalitarian ideologies represent the revolt of the inferior man against the aristocratic Indo-European virtues of strength, pride and nobility. For National Socialism, Christianity and eventually Marxism had worked against the aristocratic principle of life and for the benefit of the inferior, the degenerate and the decadent; that is, in promotion of the Untermensch. 

Hitler conceived the birthright of the Übermensch, a man with a scale of ascending, noble and genuinely European Traditional Values. His pursued goal consisted of creating healthier, stronger and smarter people, saving society's resources, and alleviating human suffering. Broadly speaking, the politics of Lycurgus. In an early NSDAP essay, Hitler wrote: “Life demands the constant victory of the strong and the healthy over the weak and the sick. The peoples that have disappeared in the course of history are those that have lost their wisdom about the laws of nature […] as the popular saying goes ‘happiness, after all, is always reserved for the most capable.’” 

Hitler claimed that the Aryan race was stronger, healthier, and fitter to rule (Herrenvolk). In My Struggle, he emphasizes the question of recovering the lost primal qualities of the Aryan race through a eugenic process of racial purification: “There is only one sacred right, and that right is a duty towards the most sacred, consisting of ensuring racial purity”. National Socialism promoted solidarity at the racial level that, in no case, promoted the destruction of other races. Hitler declared that “an individual takes pride in his race and demonstrates precisely his vital force and will to live. I even think that it will be easier to understand with the other races the more they persist in their racial pride.”

My Honor is called Loyalty

Hitler's Child Soldiers, Berlin 1945.

You are nothing; your people are everything. He who loves his people shows it by the sacrifices he is willing to make for others.

― Adolf Hitler

The Waffen SS represented the ideal of a German Übermensch. The SS initiation, the most severe training school in Europe since the agogé, was fundamental to invigorate, strengthen and harden the body and mind of the Germans. The goal of the SS military training was to create a superior elite force which would make the soldiers vigorous, firm, tough and disciplined men. There was no place for sloppiness in the SS lines and it prevented the fighting spirit from being undermined. Despite the rigor, kindness and nobility were required towards comrades, compatriots and people in general. 

For the SS, loyalty meant absolute and spontaneous obedience to a greater degree: “My honor is called loyalty”. The Totenkopf or Totenkopfring ring of the SS (made at the request of Himmler), was a tangible symbol of membership in an order that demanded complete obedience and loyalty. Himmler declared that all rings of all SS men and officers killed or fallen in battle should be returned to be kept in an ark in the Wewelsburg castle as a symbolic expression of their eternal community and brotherhood.

During the Battle of Berlin, the Thermopiles of 1945, the 33rd SS Volunteer Grenadier Division Charlemagne was the last stronghold of the Reich. In those days, Hitler could have evaded the Soviets and fled from Germany. But in the sense of honor and loyalty to the Homeland, he decided to stay until the end. Hitler’s fiercest detractors had seen his suicide as an act of cowardice. But for him, fleeing would have represented a true act of cowardice. He wanted to die as so many fighters of National Socialism had done, especially as their Führer. Ritual suicide has been practiced by many exceptional men whose mission had ended, men who, after fulfilling their destiny, had nothing left to do in Earth. 

Moments before his death, Adolf Hitler had dictated in his last will and testament: “I have therefore decided to remain in Berlin and there to choose death voluntarily at the moment when I believe that the position of the Fuhrer and the Chancellery itself can no longer be maintained. I will die with a joyful heart in the knowledge of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our peasants and workers and of a contribution unique in the history of our youth which bears my name...” Before dying, Hitler had the satisfaction of knowing that thousands of people whom he never got to know, especially young people and children, had given their lives during the Battle of Berlin, defending their German Homeland, sacrificing everything for something greater than themselves. 

If history can write that the people of this country have never abandoned their leader and that they have never abandoned his people, this will be an eternal Victory.

― Joseph Goebbels, 1945