That is, I finally assumed my Greekness… I saw that I was the only person left in that square who had the freedom left to choose…"
The very importance that Conchis attaches to this type of morality and freedom of choice, even to the detriment of his own life, is in itself subjective and reactionary. After being forced to witness the full horror of what the German morality was capable of, Conchis found himself driven to ultimately resist it, regardless of its consequences. It is a type of ethics that refuses to accept as true anything beyond its own reason and paradigms. This is also true of the decision-making process at the basis of Colonel Wimmel's moral actions, questionable though they may be.
Colonel Wimmel subscribes to the collective ethical subjectivism of the Nazi German paradigm. This is summed up in the Conchis's criticism (p. 393):
"One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true -- they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the superego…"
The Nazi belief in their cause was based upon a collective belief in the reality of their order. Indeed, Wimmel himself claims the reasons for his atrocious actions as being based upon his nature as a "realist" (p. 388). Later he notes that nothing is more important to him than the order he perceives as the highest purpose of his existence and his actions. This, along with the clear fallacy of the belief, is a typically subjectivist belief system.
It is the extremity and strength of this belief that temporarily drove Conchis to the belief that he had not choice. When collective subjectivism imposes itself upon the individual, the individual morality can be influenced to such an extent that it changes the individual's own moral system, whether this is subjectivist or...
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