Local Concentrations of Hitler

So imagine — in some plausible but also completely implausible corner of the NSF^1 — a group of grad-students, all well-intentioned in that guileless way that grad-students sometimes are before their committees have wrung it out of them, have managed to jury-rig a kind of pocket device which, and there’s no other way to say this, detects Hitler Particles. Not actual particles in the physics sense, but something more like the particulate residue of capital-H Hitlerness that the world never quite vacuumed up after 1945 and that continues to distribute itself invisibly, insidiously, across human psyches and institutions like pollen from a poison tree.^2

The device, outwardly, looks like a Geiger counter (crème, plastic, anachronistically analog dial), and it emits a series of clicks or crackles that accelerate proportionally with local concentrations of Hitler. What’s unnerving — and here’s where things get real uncanny real quick — is that it works not just on places (say: a beer hall, a parade ground, certain kinds of Internet comment sections), but also on people. One can, with a trembling hand and a kind of guilty curiosity, pass the wand-like sensor over a colleague, a cousin, a cashier, and hear the tiny transistorized voice of History itself mutter and pop.

Now — and this is where we get into the David Foster Wallace-style hyper-analytic parenthesis — the “Hitler level” does not correspond to anything straightforwardly political (membership in certain parties, voting records, etc.). Rather it maps something like the latent authoritarian drive, the greed, the tendency to punch down, the boot licking, the still-warm ashes of resentment, the twitchy attraction to purity, conformity, hierarchy and order that lurks beneath what passes, externally, for normal civility.

Example: You’re standing in line at the DMV and, out of boredom, you flick the switch. The man two ahead of you, khakis, polo shirt, wireless earpiece — the counter gives off a faint irregular tick, nothing alarming, about the level of background Hitler you’d expect in late-capitalist civic infrastructure. Then you pivot ever so slightly toward the woman behind the counter and the thing suddenly chatters like a popcorn popper on overdrive. Not because she’s secretly plotting annexations, but because some deep unprocessed hatred of “disorder” has settled in her marrow after decades of telling people to fill out Form 27B in triplicate.

The problem, of course, is that once you’ve got the gadget you can’t not use it, and once you start using it you can’t really stop seeing the world as an infinite granular distribution of Hitlerness, like cosmic microwave background radiation, only more depressing. Which leads to the ethical quandary (i.e. what the grad-students never thought through): if the Hitler Particles are everywhere, and in everyone, and vary only by degree, then what, exactly, does “detection” accomplish other than an inexhaustible new form of paranoia?

^1 National Science Foundation, or maybe DARPA, depending on how cynical you are. 

^2 To be clear: not literal pollen. Not inhalable, not trackable by HEPA filters. Think more like a metaphysical aerosol.

It’s the slow, jittery always-on crackle that starts to gnaw at you. At first you think: “Okay, baseline background Hitlerness, fine.” But then you realize the baseline is higher than you thought. The HPD becomes less a tool of detection than a kind of epistemic contamination device. Every place, every person, every silence gets reinterpreted through its static. And once that new interpretive layer is there, it won’t go away. You can’t un-hear the crackle. The world is suddenly a gas cloud of fascist residue, and your faith in “normal” social life — those easy, thoughtless exchanges — erodes. Anxiety isn’t a side-effect, it’s the main outcome: the HPD rewires your experience of reality until all that’s left is gradations of Hitlerness.

LLM