The sinkhole

I've now read both of Richard Fausset's articles in the New York Times (and The Atlantic parody) about a neo-Nazi living in America's heartland. And I think I know why Fausset is so stymied about where his subject went wrong.

In the United States, for several generations now, we've been taught through books, TV and movies that Nazis are The Big Bad Guys. Think about their portrayals in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Schindler's List. There's nothing even halfway redeeming about them. And yet, when one meets actual Nazis, white nationalists, supremacists -- whatever it is they're calling themselves today -- one tends to be taken aback not by their horrific beliefs, but by their outward politeness and affability. (No, I'm not carrying water for the Nazis; stick with me.) I think that outwardly normal quality is what shocks us as Americans, because we're not used to the idea that "Nazi" could possibly be connected to "polite" or "friendly" in any way. We're used to seeing them as unalloyed evil. They couldn't ever be nice.

And then I thought of a similar situation where our brains meet with cognitive dissonance between what we expect and what we actually experience: mental illness.

I know a few people -- maybe you do too -- who are seriously mentally ill, but you'd never guess it from a casual conversation. Because most mentally ill people are not completely messed up. In certain mental areas, they seem perfectly fine. Indeed, they can be lucid, intelligent, charming, funny, when discussing all sorts of topics. You can get to a point where you believe that they don't really have a mental illness at all, that they were misdiagnosed or misunderstood.

And then you hit the sinkhole.

"The sinkhole" in this case is the spot in the mentally ill person's mind where the illness resides and has festered. Find this spot, and you will no longer wonder why this person was diagnosed with a mental illness. It becomes almost palpably obvious.

To put it another way, most mentally ill people are not like the deranged, mumbling street crazies you see in the movies. They are not caricatures. They can be lucid and very competent under the right conditions. The sinkhole hasn't taken over their minds completely. That doesn't make them any less mentally ill.

Likewise, Nazis. Most of them are not totally depraved. They love their families and pet dogs and give to charities, and they probably hold down steady jobs. And then you hit the sinkhole where they start talking about how Hitler did nothing wrong and the Holocaust was overblown, or even if it wasn't, the Jews deserved to die. Just because they can be nice under certain conditions doesn't mean they don't believe in horrors.

By saying this, I'm not trying to conflate the mentally ill with Nazis. Mentally ill people are struggling with a medical condition; they didn't bring it on themselves, any more than a victim of a heart attack or a cancer patient. Nazis made a choice, or more likely a number of choices, to espouse a vile ideology; their issues are self-inflicted.

Fausset, I think, went into the interview with the half-formed expectation that his subject would be a mustache-twirling villain -- or, at the very least, that the reason for his political metastasis into Nazism would, after sufficient questioning, be revealed as an obvious traumatic experience in his formative years. But Fausset found no smoking gun, and this was deeply puzzling to him; it is reflected in the pop-culture question he asks near the end of his followup article: "What makes a man start fires?"

Well, it's not always easy to explain why people make destructive choices. But perhaps the answer can be found in another pop-culture quote: some men just want to watch the world burn.

Despite what we've seen in popular culture, we as Americans need to get our brains around the concept that Nazis are still Nazis even though they can come across as "nice." We cannot allow Nazism to become normalized in the USA because some Nazis seem normal. Just because there's still a fringe of normality around the sinkhole doesn't mean the sinkhole doesn't exist.