Reck compares Nazi Germany to a passage in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed:

“All are slaves and equal in their slavery. Everyone belongs to all, and all to everyone, and the great thing about it is equality. To begin with, the level of education, and science, and talents is lowered. A high level of education and science is only possible for great intellects, and they are not wanted. The great intellects have always seized power and been the despots. Great intellects cannot help being despots, and they've always done more harm than good. They will be banished or put to death. Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned. Down with culture. 'We've had enough of scholarship. Discipline comes first. The one thing wanting in the world is discipline. The drive for knowledge is an aristocratic drive we will destroy; we'll employ drunkenness, slander, spying; we'll stifle every genius in its infancy. We'll reduce all to a common denominator! Complete equality, absolute submission, absolute loss of individuality, the Pope at the head, with us 'round him, and below us – Shigalovism! ... But one or two generations of vice are essential now; monstrous, abject vice by which a man is transformed into a loathsome, cruel, egoistic reptile. There's going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before. Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness, the earth will weep for its old gods...” (50).

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Plutocracy controlled anti-intellectualism:

“Industry pulls the strings; it has controlled the General Staff since the days of Ludendorff. The instrument of power is terror, and the industrialists hold tight to it. They control every means of influencing public opinion, and have thereby stupefied the great unproductive mass – salaried people, office workers, most of the lower ranking government employees – to the point of idiocy. The rest is a mixture of business people and nobility come down in the world, melted into a middle-class lump with the newly created officers and quick turnover fellows. These people are more materialistic than the Bolshevik Russians, live from day to day, and haven't the slightest conception of the grim little game that has been begun here” (106).

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Plutocracy wants to keep people stupid because educated people oppose their regime:

“The great majority of the workers and practically all the intellectuals were bitter opponents of the regime” (106).