Die Welle (The
Wave), a German film released in 2008, centers around a week-long mini-course
on autocracy. The following question put to the high-school students as well as
the film’s viewers: Is a totalitarian regime like the National Socialists in
the second quarter of the twentieth century still possible? Undergirding this
question is the more basic question pertaining to human nature. Namely, does
human nature crave the intensity of collective meaning through uniformity that
a dictator can provide?
In his discourse on inequality, Rousseau argues that
additional, distinctly
artificial, economic (and
political) inequalities are all but certain in the unnaturally large social
arrangements requiring more social interaction with strangers than was the case
when members of the homo sapiens species lived as hunter-gatherers in small
groups, or bands.[1]
Living in small groups fit well with the human tolerance for interacting with
less than 150 people—enough to trust without undue anxiety. Inequalities going
along with this congruence were, Rousseau asserts, quite natural—not as large
as, say, those between a king or emperor and “the masses.”
The Wave explores why we mere mortals put up with such inequalities
of power, and thus whether autocracy is still possible in Germany, und der Welt. Are we immune, buttressed
by the artificial safeguards seemingly built into our modern societies, or do
we crave a larger meaning that is ostensibly possible only by subsuming a sense
of individuality to blend into a larger whole led and enforced by autocratic artifice?
Are we that hungry to fill the emptiness
that ensues from the onslaught of post-modern deconstructivism within the shell
of modernity’s fractured communities and families?
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on
the Origins of Inequality, Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed., Vol. 34 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press,1910).
