Schopenhauer's Cheap Pride

Arthur Schopenhauer
By Johann Schäfer - Frankfurt am Main
University Library, Public Domain.

    There's this thing that happens, where I come up with an idea that I think is just dandy, smart, and incisive, and then I find out someone else came up with it long before I did.  [Big, gusty sigh]

    A few weeks ago, I rewrote the third chapter of Biscuit, and, in an attempt to understand why the Germans supported Hitler, I wrote the following scene between my Grandma Roma, great-grandmother, and great-aunt:

    There was a lull, and then her sister asked with quiet befuddlement, “I don’t understand what the Germans see in him. He’s a sweaty little man with a tiny mustache and a bad haircut that flops into his face.  And he shrieks up on that stage like he is having an apoplexy.  In his letters, has Kuba ever said anything about why people like Hitler?” 

    Roma nodded.  “Jake says it’s because Hitler offers them cheap pride at a time when… how did he put it? Oh. Yes. When they were jobless and starving for empty dignity.”

    “Cheap pride?” Lola asked.

    “You know how people naturally take pride in things they work hard for?” When Roma saw that her mother and sister understood where she was going, she continued. “Well, what if you have nothing like that? No job, nothing to work for, nothing to point to that’s worthy?”

    Teofila put it together first. “Hitler gave them something easy to be proud of, didn’t he? Maybe the only thing in their life for which they never had to struggle.”

    “Yes, Mama,” Roma answered. “You don’t need any personal accomplishments, nor even useful skills.  All you have to do is be born Aryan.”

    Lola finished the idea. “And if you weren’t born Aryan, well then, tough luck.”

    The women were quiet for a long time.

 

    I was really proud of my cheap pride concept.  Germany had been harshly punished for WW1, and the Great Depression hadn't helped matters. Between the reparations and the mass joblessness due to the depression, the people were desperate for something to believe in.  I have always felt that the Treaty of Versailles, which pinned the fault for WW1 on Germany, is what led to the rise of Hitler and the cause of WW2.

    Then, today, the following quote by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer came across my Facebook feed:

“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; pride in his own nation suggests he has no qualities of his own for which he can be proud, otherwise he would not reach for what he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen.  He who possesses significant personal merits will see clearly the ways in which his own nation falls short, since its failings will be constantly before his eyes. But that poor beggar who has nothing in the world for which he can be proud, as a last resort, latches onto pride in the nation to which he belongs, and is ready and glad to defend tooth and nail, all of the nation's errors and follies, thus reimbursing himself for his own lack of accomplishments."

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860

    Well, okay, then.   Looks like I didn't come up with the idea first; Schopenhauer did, more than 100 years before I was born. [Another big, gusty sigh].  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, though. The Ecclesiastes principle states that "there is nothing new under the sun," and Mark Twain might have said, "There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope."   While I might not have come up with the idea, this does tell me that human nature doesn't really change, though.