Hey everybody. It's James Lindsay. You're listening to the new Discourses podcast, and we're back for another episode of our Nazi experiment series. I believe this, if I'm not mistaken, oh my gosh, is volume 7. So we're really getting into it. We're trucking mostly through Mind Conf.

You'll know that in the previous episode, we ran through a little Carl Schmidt and his legal basis for the total state for the Nazi totalitarian project, which he explicitly said was a Nazi totalitarian project.

But, you know, just to give the quick brief introduction, I don't think I'm going to try to rattle off what all six episodes previously or seven episodes previously because there is the pre-the prequel episode I did cover. But basically what we're doing is we're imagining that, you know, a society might find itself in a set of bad circumstances and do an experiment to try to get out of them.

The Nazis ran one such experiment. They were under the conditions that they found themselves in in the

interwar period, having just lost World War I. The situation was not good. They were desperately searching for a national identity.

They had all kinds of weird things going on as were

happening in the early 20th century. Ariosophy, for example, which is like this combination of

theosophical thought with all of the weird root race stuff, but then with the Aryan race beliefs

that the Nazis basically ended up being characterized by.

They had lots of weird stuff going on. So they run this experiment to run a totalitarian

fascist state based on a racialist worldview. Racialist means explicitly here that this is not

just race-based or racist, but it's actually kind of deeper.

Hitler's vision for what the racialist worldview is, is that the races, just like all

creatures on earth, are in an intrinsic competition with one another, where survival of the

fittest means that the strongest and best will survive. This is not actually

what the theory of evolution posits, but it's the kind of vision that you could imagine a

crazy German person would take up about it. And so the idea was to purify and maximize

the quality of the race in the next couple episodes after this one,

I think you're really going to hear some of that,

although it's here and there throughout Minkv.

But at any rate, in this episode,

what we're going to talk about is what citizenship in the Nazi regime

...