“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you are discussing the nature of good and bad, you are on tricky ground indeed, for many — or most — of man’s atrocities to man have been committed in misguided pursuit of “the good.”

Whose good (question mark)? Is “good” an absolute (question mark)? In your arena of events, obviously, one man’s good can be another’s disaster. [Adolf] Hitler pursued his version of “the good” with undeviating fanatical intent. He believed in the superiority and moral rectitude of the Aryan race. In his grandiose, idealized version of reality, he saw that race “set in its proper place,” as natural master of mankind.¹

You must realize that Hitler believed that any atrocity was justified in the light of what he thought of as the greater good. To some extent or another, many of the ideals he held and advocated had long been accepted in world communities, though they had not been acted upon with such dispatch. The nations of the world saw their own worst tendencies personified in Hitler’s Germany, ready to attack them. The Jews, for various reasons — and again, this is not the full story — the Jews acted as all of the victims of the world, both the Germans and the Jews basically agreeing upon “man’s nefarious nature.” For the first time the modern world realized its vulnerability to political events, and technology and communication accelerated all of war’s dangers. Hitler brought many of man’s most infamous tendencies to the surface. For the first time, again, the species understood that might alone did not mean right, and that in larger terms a world war could have no real victors. Hitler might well have exploded the world’s first atomic bomb.

You must realize that fanatics always deal with grandiose ideals, while at the same time they believe in man’s sinful nature, and the individual’s lack of power. They cannot trust the expression of the self, for they are convinced of its duplicity. Their ideals then seem even more remote. Fanatics call others to social action. Since they do not believe that the individual is ever effective, their groups are not assemblies of private individuals come reasonably together, pooling individual resources. They are instead congregations of people who are afraid to assert their individuality, who hope to find it in the group, or hope to establish a joint individuality — and that is an impossibility (emphatically).

(The scientist Seth referred to is a professor of physics Jane heard from early last month. He’d posed some intriguing questions about Seth’s ideas of the “true” nature of the universe, and in the nonbook session for April 30 [the 849th], Seth had given a few paragraphs of material in a partial answer.)