Ikonopis

Abridged Psychosophy analysis report: Rust

(Full 10 page report was shared privately to the client)

Source used: Syntax of Love

Material provided: Questionnaire answers with elaboration, memoirs from close ones, conversation with partner

Diagnosis: "napoleon" - VFLE

Alternative diagnosis: "tvardovsky" - VFEL

1st Will

With most things in life, to me, there is always a simple choice: do I want it or not? If I do want it, well, go do it then. I apply this simple criterion to myself and the world around me. A friend gives me reasons as to why he has not done X thing yet, and it all seems like an excuse. All of that is a nice way to rationalize the bottom line: he simply does not want it. He might say he does, but he is full of shit.

Rust’s self-perception is of being a strong-willed, determined, and driven person. Rust reduces the success of his enterprises as a matter of wanting and desiring it. The lack of planning indicates Logic is not on top and that it is below Will.

Rust's partner wrote of him: Passionate. Overwhelming. He loves, he loves loudly. He hates, he hates loudly. His words are untethered horses. If lit with anger, he paces, and he paces; he takes all the space in the room with the sheer weight of his state. His anger is never expressed through physical aggression, but rather through the force of his words; he proclaims, passionately, his thoughts, his frustrations, the injustices. Without sophistication, really. There is no refinement to it, nothing poetic in his anger. Just a sort of unfiltered violence in the way he speaks.

Other parts of his wife’s and friends’ descriptions could be mentioned, but it would be unnecessary and beside the point. The 1st Will is defined by two criteria. First, a division of the world between the kingly, royal, and powerful against the lowly, mundane, and weak, in which the King positions himself in the former category. Second, the uncontrollability and rebellion that comes from the feeling of belonging to such a position. Rust meets the criteria.

2nd Physics

Physics concerns the body, health, sexual life, positions and opinions regarding the economy and aesthetics, levels of optimism and vitality, and material life as a whole. Rust’s questionnaire indicated that this area of life comes next in his psyche. There is a FLEXIBILITY with the physical layer of life. It does not present vulnerability, bifurcation, or hesitation. Compared to his report on the volitional aspect, one feels a sense of naturalness and engagement with the way he speaks of his physical activity. Regarding the characteristic aspect of the 1st Physics of violence, Rust responded against it. He acknowledged his capacity for abuse but did not associate it with the use of force. This, coupled with the visible concern for and care of people’s health and stability, may indicate the PROCESS of the 2nd function.

In his attitude towards money, the attitude of the 2nd Physics is revealed: “I think money has its place, but it is unfortunate that society deems it to be the most important part of life. For me, it was never my focus. I did not lead a life that would dramatically improve my financial situation, quite the opposite. It’s better to have money than not to have it, sure. Money opens doors for you, to explore life more, not to be restricted by limitations as much. If I desire to visit my friends abroad tomorrow, I can. That is the power of money.”

Source used: Ian Kershaw’s “Hitler: Hubris-Nemesis”

1.

Much to Afanasyev’s credit, there is a lot of mythologizing around Hitler’s persona and temperament. Indeed, despite the horrible atrocities commited, Hitler was quite an average person. And by ‘average’, I mean not only in his artistic or academic skills, but the average expression of the “Anna Akhmatova” type. This will be an analysis of his life beyond the one endless portrayed as the leader of the Nazi party, and will be focused on his early life.

When the postmaster asked him one day what he wanted to do for a living and whether he wouldn’t like to join the post-office, he replied that it was his intention to become a great artist.

— A neighbour of the Hitler family in Urfahr

I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue.

— Hitler, on failing his entry examination to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna”

Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, in a traditional German household, with a stern and distant father and a loving, tender submissive mother. The records of Adolf’s early life are poorly documented, and what we have is a collection of memoirs from those who knew the Hitlers.

The young Hitler was remarked with some small traits that were later essential to his constitution as the Führer, such as his stubborn attitude and temper:

Adolf had for a time the run of the house. He showed in these months the first signs of tantrums if he did not get his way. He would remark much later that even as a boy he was used to having the last word.

His former teacher “characterized him as stubborn, high-handed, dogmatic, and hot-tempered. Strictures from his teachers were received with a scarcely concealed insolence. With his classmates he was domineering, and a leading figure in the sort of immature pranks which Huemer attributed to too great an addiction to Karl May’s Indian stories together with a tendency to waste time furthered by the daily trip from Leonding and back.”

From early on, the essential aspect of his temperament is what Syntax of Love described as the uncontrollability of the 1st Will. The EXCESS of Will defines a top-bottom hierarchical view of the world, in which the “I” — or self — are placed as superior in relation to everyone else. Not only this shows as a particular haughtiness at childhood, it also becomes even more and more power-craving as the ‘Tsar’ grows older. Hitler’s megalomania and tyranny as the Führer can be traced all the way back to his early life:

...his later patronizing contempt for the submissiveness of women, the thirst for dominance (and imagery of the Leader as stern, authoritarian father-figure), the inability to form deep personal relationships, the corresponding cold brutality towards humankind, and – not least – the capacity for hatred so profound that it must have reflected an immeasurable undercurrent of self-hatred concealed in the extreme narcissism that was its counterpoint must surely have had roots in the subliminal influences of the young Adolf’s family circumstances.

Philosophy and psychosophy: Hume’s skeptical sensualism (1st Physics + 3rd Logic)

Hume’s account of human nature is said to have subverted the authority of reason and made the case that even belief is a function of feeling, thus casting doubt “on the very possibility of enlightened reform and improvement” (Harris 2015, 21).

From a strictly philosophical perspective, Hume’s empiricism is one of the many skeptic models of metaphysical thinking, considering his opposition to the rationalistic — that is to say, dogmatic — school that dominated his time.

His doubt and suspicion of the rational element is sufficient to identify his 3rd Logic. This is throughly exhibited in his epistemological work, with a compensatory preference for what can be experienced and directly felt, what is physical. The mind is composed of perceptions, which are sensations (touch, smell, sight) and immediate reactions to these sensations (ideas, memory). From that, he defines the Copy Principle: all ideas are resembling (albeit less vivacious) copies of simple impressions. There is no mental preference for the symbolic abstraction of the mind characteristic of the 1st Logic, or the transcendental experience of the 1st Emotion, but the sensualist redundancy of experience. The Will (“I”, self, interior being) is equally put it to a secondary position derived from the strict element of perception:

Unable to find any impression of an enduring and substantive self underlying our perceptions, Hume concludes that we have no such idea; he thus argues that the self—at least “as it regards our thought or imagination” (T 1.4.6.5)—should be identified as a bundle (when considered synchronically) or succession (when considered diachronically) of associated perceptions.

In terms of what can be known, Hume goes against the idea of knowledge through induction, because it’s the process in which a person assumes unobservable causes to observable events, and that the future will necessarily follow from the way of the past. The bottom line is what we assume to be a rational succession of cause and effect is nothing more than our accommodation to the same event happening continuously. There is no law that can truly determine whether water will boil at 100°C, only that we’ve seen it happen over and over again. The thought that the sun will rise tomorrow is not a logical certainty, but the expectation of a habit we grew used to. This argument is extended in Of Scepticism with Regard to Reason (a very telling title) that “all knowledge generates into probability”, even mathematics.

Hume’s philosophy is a reflection of his character, and much of it can be understood by the reading of Syntax of Love:

A person usually assigns the status of the most reliable instrument to the strongest aspect of their nature. Therefore, another perspective on the first function is its superiority from the point of view of epistemology. According to epistemological criteria, the first function clearly divides humanity into four unequal parts: sensualists (1st Physics), voluntarists (1st Will), mystics (1st Emotion), and rationalists (1st Logic). Sensualists believe only in experience, mystics only in feelings, voluntarists only in personal energy, and rationalists only in logic.

The title of "skeptic" is deserved by any owner of the 3rd Logic, regardless of the level of education and degree of philosophical training. If there is a desire to deny the effectiveness and necessity of the rational principle in man - this is quite enough to end up in the camp of skeptics.

Goethe also exhibited the characteristic opposition, typical of his type, between the first function and the third, i.e., in this case, the 1st Physics and the 3rd Logic. Let's recall the classic example: "Theory, my friend, is dry, But the tree of life is ever green."