“Why should the Palatine boors [the Germans] be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will soon be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.

“Which leads me to one remark: That the number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawney. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only being excepted, who with the English make up the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers increased. While we are scouring our planet by clearing America of woods, and so making our side of the planet reflect a brighter light to the inhabitants of Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America, where we have an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red.”

t. Benjamin Franklin

[citation needed]

Please, Mr. Jones, just gloss over the fact that National Socialism was positively tepid in its historical context, and that the Germans self-awaredly derived much of their inspiration from the mainline blood descendants of mainline Massachusetts Puritanism, from its philosophy of Anglo-Germanic self-assertion right down to its favorite salute.

They don’t call ‘em Catholicucks for nuthin’.

I’m not fond of the whole idea of making things like addictions and so forth medical issues vs. character ones. Sure, you might be a syphilitic victim of a disease process, but a lot of what comes out of that goes back to who you actually are. I’ve seen speculation that Emperor Norton, beloved nutjob of post-Gold Rush California, was another victim of syphilis. Supposing he was, then I think that there were still some fundamental issues of character there that made him a “better” megalomaniac than Hitler. Hitler went nuts, gained vast power, and then killed millions. Norton went nuts, became a street fixture, and amused hundreds of thousands. Who was the better human being?

Hitler was innocent I tell you, innocent. :)

Because, nobody wants to admit or acknowledge the idea that there may be some external driver to human behavior–If Adolf Hitler was a victim of syphilis, then that absolves him of responsibility for what he did, and what was done in his name. Likewise, if you are an acclaimed artistic genius like Beethoven, well… What are we to do? Give the disease the Oscar nomination?

I suspect that there is rather more to the biology of it all than we would like to admit. Human consciousness is already a kludged-together concatenation of things that we’re only beginning to understand–And, there may be things we aren’t even guessing at, like the contribution made by our gut bacteria to the whole behavioral/cognitive realm. We don’t want to admit it, but we are more like a cooperative colony of organisms than we are a single discrete animal like most of us self-conceptualize.

Hell, present me with convincing evidence of the idea that we’re really only sentient due to the influence of our gut bacteria, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised at the news. I think there’s a long, long way to go until we really understand the nature of human consciousness and sentience, and how it comes about.

Until then, well… There’s this information about the influence of syphilis on human affairs, and the other thing that springs to mind is the potential for human effect with things like Toxoplasma Gondii, which is known to create some behaviors in rodents that assist cats in predation upon them. Human behavioral patterns may be modified by the disease, as well, but the issue is still being argued.

Would not surprise me a bit to find out that a good deal of what makes us “human” is some kind of parasitical disease process that’s been coopted and bootstrapped into being actually beneficial, much the way early cells absorbed and took over mitochondria.