The totalitarian mind is like “a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine … whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.”
Kurt Vonnegut used this image in his novel “Mother Night” to describe totalitarian madmen, but we all have the kind of mind he described. It’s a good image for the mind of fallen humanity and one that suggests an explanation for a particular problem: why we can hold with conviction beliefs that make little and often no sense, sometimes to the point of insanity, while thinking sanely about everything else.
It’s the problem that makes us say to others, or others say to us, “What’s wrong with you? You know better than that.” But they (or we) don’t.
The logic can’t be faulted
In “Mother Night,” an FBI agent interviews an American neo-Nazi named Jones. Obviously insane in how he sees the world, he makes perfect sense in explaining himself. His logic can’t be faulted.
The narrator explains that a mind like Jones’ “will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined,” as well as gaps where teeth are missing.
As a result, it keeps “perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds,” the narrator explains, after that “jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.”
He continues: “The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off a gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information” is how people come to believe insane things, as so many do.
That was how “Rudolf (Höss), Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers.” The gears of his mind missed teeth, probably many, and skipped over the recognition of the humanity of the million-some people he was working to death and murdering outright.
The effects of the missing teeth
Höss wasn’t unusual in that. We often see the effect of the missing teeth in the invidious distinctions people make between people. People who truly believe in human equality and human dignity will exclude from full respect and care some people for reasons of race, sex, economic success, ethnic origin, religion, stage of life, sexuality, politics and any other excuse for feeling superior.
Christians who believe the Son of God gave his life for everyone can do this as much as anyone else. A system of mental gears with missing teeth is an effect of the fall of man. Our minds don’t work right.
Of course, the people who make the invidious distinctions have reasons for ruling one group of people less human than others. If there’s one thing mankind is brilliant at, it’s rationalizing inhumanity.
Theologians before the American Civil War wrote elaborate defenses of chattel slavery that were technically theologically sound. You might find them compelling if the gears in your mind are missing the same teeth that the theologians’ were missing. If your mental gears have those teeth, you will see those defenses as morally grotesque and an abuse of Christian teaching.
Yet those theologians believed in orthodox Christianity in its Protestant form and held the Scriptures in reverence. They wrote with respect for the family and what we would call community and mutual care.
Those teeth, their minds had. But they didn’t have some that mattered hugely. They were, in that, just like Rudolf Höss.
We’re all missing teeth
We’re all missing teeth and — this is the worst part — we don’t even know what teeth we’re missing. As far as each of us knows, our mind works great. The gears are turning and meshing together and produce ideas as expected, ideas that make perfect sense to us.
We assume that because our mind is working, it must be working right. Especially as many of our peers’ minds are missing the same teeth, so we think our shared mistake is something “everyone knows.”
Even if people we normally trust tell us we’re talking complete nonsense, we don’t believe them.
Vonnegut’s narrator believes that people file off the teeth, and we certainly do. Every indulgence in sin erodes or cracks a tooth, and eventually it will break off.
But life also gives us gears without some teeth. The racist theologians grew up in a world that could not imagine anything wrong with their economic system and enslaving people to make it work.
How guilty we are for the stupid and wicked things we believe, only God knows. But Vonnegut’s image gives us an idea of why we believe them and a warning about our own limitations. It points to our need for a Church that has all its teeth.
