In 1910, in Vienna, Austria, the leading intellects of the Socialist International made Café Central their nexus, an informal hub of the Intelligentsia owing to the Café’s location adjacent to the University of Vienna’s campus. 

One personality, Leon Trotsky, plays a pivotal role in our scientific game of connect the dots due to his role as editor of a little-known periodical of the time, a paper called The Spark.  At the risk of being pedantic, I am obligated to recall Leon Trotsky was still going by his given name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, reserving his pseudonym for articles he contributed to “The Spark”, a paper destined to evolve into “Pravda”, the propaganda instrument of the Soviet Union.

That is correct, the propaganda arm of both the Soviet Union and the National Socialist Worker’s Party originate in the Café Central.  More precisely, the propaganda arm of both the Soviet Union and the National Socialist Worker’s Party originate in the psychological theories being advanced by Alfred Adler, a leading psychologist then teaching at the University of Vienna.

Nobody remembers Alfred Adler any longer because he died of a heart attack in 1933, and the reputation of his students eclipses the man’s memory.

Ignore Alfred Adler’s role in the nightmare which follows at your peril.

The other noteworthy intellectuals who made the Café Central their hub must be divided into three categories: Jews, Austrians and the Miscellany.  I do not insist the patrons of Café Central be so divided, but the café’s most infamous patron, Adolph Hitler did.

That’s right, we have to go there. 

Buckle up, buttercup.  This intersection in history was made inevitable the year Ibn Sahl quantified his theory of optics.

Among Café Central’s Jewish patrons were noteworthy intellectuals like psychologist Alfred Adler, flamboyant poet and writer Peter Altenberg, journalist and author Theodore Herzl, playwriter and actor Egon Friedell, journalist and essayist Anton Kuh, psychoanalyst Adolph Joffe, novelist Leo Perutz, and writer and theater critic Alfred Polgar.

Prominent Austrian intellectuals who frequented Café Central are psychoanalyst Siegmund Freud, author Stefan Zweig, author Robert Musil, architect Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos, author, poet and librettist Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal and, of course, Adloph Hitler.

Leading intellectuals outside the Jewish-Austrian polarities include Serbian Josip Broz Tito, Joseph Stalin, and, of special significance were Dimitrije Motrinovic, a known associate of Alfred Adler, and Vladimir Gacinovic, a known associate of Loen Trotsky.

I emphasize, affix Motrinovic and Gacinovic in your mind, since these two are the direct connection between Alfred Adler and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914.  In Café Central, Alfred Adler and Dimitrije Motrinovic sat at the adult’s table.  Trotsky and Gacinovic sat at the kid’s table.

Don’t think for a minute they did not mingle. 

These men are only those who survive in the Wiki today, and no mention of women in the early days of the Socialist International are acknowledged in that lofty publication, but trust me, they were ever present. Feminists, who consistently rail against the omission of women from the history books are strangely silent when it comes to what amounts to an open conspiracy leading to World War I and World War II.  Misogyny could account for the absolution Socialism’s leading women find in the official record.

Frankly, I lean in favor of the feminist interpretation when it comes to the Socialist International for, though women are principal figures throughout the early years, they were always riding shotgun. 

Misogynists have insinuated a greater role of women in the early years of the Socialist International, but no suggestion of a hidden power behind social evolution has been documented to my satisfaction.

No, if there is any hidden influence behind the Socialist movement, it will be found in the opium and morphine which circulated openly legally among accredited academia in the period.  Opium and other narcotics were smuggled into Europe, but only to avoid import tariffs and red tape. 

Joseph Stalin, it has been presumed, found his entre in Vienna while smuggling opium from Persia, through his homeland in the Caucuses, and up the Danube.

For decades, everyone who was anyone, and everyone who was not, met and canoodled in Vienna’s Cafes, with Café Central being, as the name implies, central to all.

Imagine Vienna’s cafes as the internet of the day, and Café Central as that network’s Google, and you have a fair grasp on Café Central’s role in world culture.  If you wanted to know what was going on and who was making it go, you need only to stop by Café Central.

Europe’s Intelligentsia did not go to Café Central because Café Central was the place to be, Café Central was the place to be because Europe’s Intelligentsia went there.  As in every age, the Intelligentsia is mostly composed of the elite, the giant intellects of the day, their proteges, and various and sundry hangers on.

Adolph Hitler was hanging on.  In 1910, Adolph was squandering a small inheritance pretending to be a student.   Language barriers would have inclined him toward the Austrians in the Café, but there will have been no way for Adolph to miss copies of pamphlets like The Spark.

Anyone who has read a biography of Adolph Hitler is aware the man acquired his obsession with Austrian and “Germanic” opera, with classical art and with architecture during his Vienna years, so it stands to reason he will have been acquainted with, influenced by and, possibly, mentored to the degree one can be mentored by a café clique, by Zweig, Musil, Loos, and von Hofmannsthal.

Noone that I am aware of has ever compared and contrasted the work of the Austrians of Hitler’s Vienna years with the artistic proclivities of the man later in life, but why drag men who can only have tolerated youthful enthusiasm into the NAZI nightmare?

I don’t have the time, personally.  But trust you me, the language barriers operative in the ambient ensure the young Adolph was listening to what the Austrians had to say while reading the what the Russians, Slavs and Jews put in ink.

Alfred Adler was the bridging personality of that you may be sure.  Fluent in both Russian and Austrian, Adler’s intimate professional association with Sigmund Freud ensures the two cliques were cross pollinating topically, more so at the adult’s table than amongst the kids, but the trickle-down theory applies in social circles if it does not apply in economics.

Knowing what we know about Adolph Hitler’s abhorrence of everything “degenerate”, I can’t accept that Sigmund Freud’s theories on psychology would have interested the young Adolph at all.

To suggest that science was transformational in the early 20^th century would be an understatement.  An avalanche of new information was pouring through Ibn Sahl’s lens, some of it wonderous, most of it disturbing.  Life at the microscopic level of existence was completely alien to the men and women scrying for new discoveries in laboratories all over the world.

The University of Vienna was no exception.  In fact, owing to Vienna’s dominant position on a major fork in the Danube River, Vienna had served since Napolean’s day as Europe’s intellectual hub.  Great concern was being raised in every quarter of Europe about all the strange and fascinating ideas leaking from laboratories left, right and center. 

Opinions coalesced in a predictably similar pattern.  And while Europe’s aristocracy were firmly affiliated with the Classical School, and the Nobility affiliated with if not enshrined in the Ecclesiastical School, His Majesty Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary was uncharacteristically progressive.  

His Majesty recognized that there was no stopping progress, and Kingdoms which facilitated progress instead of impeding progress were destined to enjoy the blessings of discovery and innovation well in advance of others.

His Majesty was not wrong.  No, Franz Joseph I was not wrong at all.  What His Majesty could not have foreseen was an influx of both benevolent and malicious intellects in every domain of academia and commerce.  Certainly His Majesty was no fool, nor were his intelligence and law enforcement institutions idle, they were just outnumbered. 

Whether or not the young Adolph Hitler was an agent for Vienna’s security services is occasionally debated, but always refuted.  Still, the question lingers.  In my humble opinion, Adolph was too young to be anything more than an informant, perhaps an asset being groomed as a sleeper, an ambitious young man with pronounced Bavarian affinities, and just naïve enough in 1910 to bask in the attention of more accomplished men.

Men like Austrian architect, Adolf Loos, or librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, both fixtures at Café Central.  I connect these two men in particular as they are prominent dots in any character sketch of the young Adolph.  It was in Vienna, later biographers confirm, where Adolph acquired and refined an intense, almost obsessive interest in both architecture and opera.

Another prominent Austrian at the adults table in Café Central was Sigmund Freud, who too easily could have predicted the path of least resistance as the young Adolph Hitler struggled to emerge from his childhood cocoon and emerge a respectable man.  Adolph will have chosen a father figure, or two, and emulated those he wished he could become. 

Loos and Von Hofmannsthal were examples if not exemplars.

Loos and Von Hofmannsthal were more likely to be security agents, not Adloph.  But, to the degree that Loos and Von Hofmannsthal were security agents, Adolph would certainly have been a prime candidate for recruitment, if only as a passive asset.

Passive assets may require some explaining.  Passive assets are individuals who are cooperating with intelligence or law enforcement agencies without knowing they are cooperating with anyone at all.  Passive agents function in security operations as the “friend of the friend”, which was necessary at café Central.

Of interest to Crown Security in Austria will have been the network of Russians, many of which were Jews, who daily congregated at the café, opinion on matters de jour and printing pamphlets, circulating them locally as flyers, and sending them to every university in Europe in a flurry of envelopes.

The challenge in infiltrating the Russians was found in both a language and an age barrier.  The Russians flooding from the Tsar’s repressions were too young to welcome either Loos or Von Hofmannsthal into their circle.  Austria’s security services would not be welcomed at Trotsky’s corner table in their usual, monocled manner.  Personally, I suspect Alfred Adler may have been recruited to befriend the new arrivals early on, owing to his fluences in Russian, his ethnic affiliation as a Jew and, lastly, his leadership position at the University of Vienna.

I just can’t prove that was a fact.  In fact, all that follows suggests Alfred Adler was the opposite, perhaps the mastermind behind the outbreak of both World War I and World War II.  Historians will be wrestling with the answer to that question for decades to come, perhaps even for centuries.

The reason Alfred Adler finds himself as Public Enemy No. 1 after World War I breaks out is because of the newly evolved species congregating at Leon Trotsky’s table.  Remember how I implored you above to affix Motrinovic and Gacinovic in your mind?  We’re not there yet but we’re getting close. 

First, allow me to put theoretical flesh on Alfred Adler’s academic bones.  Without an understanding of what Alfed Adler brought to Trotsky’s table, there is no way to understand the connection between Motrinovic and Adler, or the connection between Trotsky and Gacinovic.

In 1910, Alfred Adler would have been considered an Agnostic, but in fact he was an Atheist.  Adler himself would have refuted any such observation, but I argue that Adler’s traditional professorial posture and traditional, Austrian carriage masked what even Adler could not or would not admit.

Adler’s work in psychology was not just Marxist, it was a predictable extension in psychology of Karl Marx’s treatise in sociology.  Adler did not hide his academic affinity with Marx, or even prevaricate about Marx as the antecedent to his own line of inquiry.  Adler saw himself as pioneering an “evolutionary theory of psychology.

In so doing, Adler employed Marx’s template as defined in The German Ideology.  In the German Ideology Karl Marx argued the physiology of all living organism was not limited to the organic body, the collection of cells and tissues we call a “being”, but also included the inorganic ambient in each organism’s ambient.  The air, the water, the earth, everything with a capacity to influence the biology of a living thing was, to Marx, intrinsic to the biology of that living thing.

In similar fashion did Alfred Adler extend the psyche of sentient creatures to the ambient.  In Alfred Adler’s model of psychology, there was the “individual psyche”, the brain-mind-thought of the individual, but there also existed a “psyche” which forms in the social ambient, a precipitate of communication and interaction.

To reduce the “social psyche’ to “public opinion” would be a gross oversimplification of the “social psyche” Adler proposed.  I won’t attempt a thorough explanation of Adlerian Psychology here, especially since a naïve appreciation of the potentials of the theory are best suited to any examination of Leon Trotsky’s interest in Adler.

From any novice’s perspective, Adler was clearly suggesting that groups of individuals can and inevitably do form “thought cliques”, social affinities which form around a common interest.  Nearly everyone participates in scores of cliques throughout their lives, even if they are not aware they do.

 

Just think of your own life.  You have a family clique, the friends clique, the school clique, and the work clique.  None of these social groups fulfills the same roll as the others and, as we all know, each clique takes on a character of its own, adopts its own vocabulary, its own sense of humor and its own politics.  The longer a clique has been together, the more distinct it becomes and the longer new arrivals must participate before being accepted into the clique.

As Trotsky quickly learned, the café cliques at Café Central were critical to his purposes.  Adlerian psychology becomes the singular focus of the leading Socialists of that age because, according to Marx, the Proletariat had to form a clique before they could achieve their evolutionary revolution.

Adler was not offering an interesting theory to the Proletariat.  Adler was offering a determinative psychology to the proletariat.  What Adler offered the Proletariat was an understanding, a procedure by which they could organize and cultivate the Proletariat as a distinct social class.

Trotsky’s pamphlet, The Spark, was the primary instrument through which Russian Socialists were attempting to organize and cultivate class consciousness.  Anything that could improve The Spark, Trotsky saw as a priority.  Adler turned The Spark into the most catalytic literary journal in human history.

Leon Trotsky, it must be observed at this point, was many years Alfred Adler’s junior, both chronologically and socially.  Adler was an established academic with tenure and the promise of a long, fulfilling career ahead of him.  Trotsky, on the other hand was a stateless fugitive from the Tsar’s justice, conspiring with mentors and minions alike to stage a violent revolution.

Adler would have laughed at Trotsky’s hubris had the case against the new Russian arrivals been laid out before him as I just did.  Perhaps Adler’s affinity for the new Russian arrivals, most of whom were Jews like himself, could not perceive Trotsky as a threat, or perhaps Adler’s academic integrity could not allow himself to apprehend what damage his theories would do once they leaked from the lab.

Alfred Adler was a professor and, at the heart of every professor is a student who just wants to be heard and respected.  Alfred Adler likely saw Trotsky as just another student hanging on his professor’s every word, a willing ear and probing mind with whom to field ideas and explore theoretical potential free of risk.

Brainstorming with colleagues was fraught with risk, plagiarism not being the least.  But with a castaway like Leon Trotsky, and the transients Trotsky entertained as they passed through Vienna, Adler could filibuster for hours without inhibition.  Truthfully, that is how a lot of good thinking gets done.

 

Even if Adler had no Marxist leanings at all, Adler would have found himself studying Trotsky’s clique.  It was Trotsky and his clique of socialists, after all, who were boasting of having achieved a distinct “class consciousness”.  That was precisely what Adlerian psychology predicted, the evolution of individual psychology in tandem with a determinative social group.

Some tension exists between a “social group” and the “social ambient”.  For example, a chess club defines a “social group”, whereas a soccer stadium defines a “social ambient”.  Though no one attending a soccer game need necessarily know each other, a common context and common experience bonds the individual psyches of all in attendance for as long as they are in the “social ambient”. 

In the “social ambient” the crowd in aggregate begins to exhibit a psychology of its own, a “group think” in direct proportion to the emotional intensity of the event.  Whether the home team is winning or losing, where the emotional intensity in the ambient increases, so too will the cohesion of individual psyches to the aggregate, “social psyche”.

Adler was suggesting that it was possible to animate a crowd at the psychological level and, theoretically, just theoretically mind you, motivate the crowd to act in concert and with specificity.  For example, when emotional energy is high, it is easy to motivate a crowd at a sports stadium to perform the human wave.  Try that in the first minute of a game and you will look foolish indeed, for the emotional intensity has not drawn individual psychology into an aggregate.

Mind you, Leon Trotsky was not planning to lead a soccer stadium in a human wave.  Leon Trotsky was planning to incite a worldwide revolution, but thanks, Professor Adler, you were a real help.

Was Alfred Adler aware of where Trotsky was planning to go with his theories on psychology?  I am convinced he was not.  I am convinced Professor Adler was to Leon Trotsky what Professor Slughorn was to Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter series.  Adler was merely collecting a promising young mind.  But, in tutoring Leon Trotsky in how to make The Spark an addictive nipple of propaganda, Adler unleashed a monster on Mankind before he knew what was even occurring.

Adler, you see, taught Trotsky how to manipulate two contending forces in the human psyche: The inferiority complex and the superiority complex.  Adler proposed that every human being had these two contending voices within, one which appraises the self as inferior and one which revolts against that inferiority.  Imagining these as a devil and an angel riding on everyone’s proverbial shoulders gets you halfway to Adler’s truth.

These two contending voices are, themselves, precipitates of social psychology, for inputs from others are processed internally, and the voice that lends clarity to that evaluation process becomes a thought and memory “complex” which persists throughout our life. 

According to Adler, in all individuals, a parallel process forms which critiques and explores the inferiority complex and compensates for any degradation of the ego with a reinforcing, internal dialogue which ever and always seeks to mitigate any degradation from the inferiority complex.

In well adjusted individuals, the disparity between the inferiority complex and the superiority complex is fractional.  In fact, the disparity between the inferiority complex and the superiority complex is a measure of the psychological stability of the individual, or, as Alerian Theory predicts, the group.

That caught Trotsky’s attention.

What did Adler mean when he predicted that a “social psyche” could become unstable?

I won’t endeavor an answer to that question here since that very thing remains debated.  Just be aware that the Socialist International was intensely interested in the superpower Adler proposed.

In 1910 even the term Socialist International would be premature to use.  The terms had been adapted, but mostly as passing flattery, and applied to the collection of scholars with whom Trotsky was corresponding, but in truth the movement lacked definition.  In fact, it was at Café Central where the Socialist Movement formed into its three distinct wings.

The central wing was occupied and defined by Europe’s “Social Democrats”, Russian fugitives and a few isolated intellectual cliques in the United States.  The left wing, the wildly radical Anarchists were primarily formed of youthful zealots along the Danube, whose Young Italy, Young Turk and Young Bosnia movements were socialism’s volatile, explosive component.

The right wing of Socialism was nowhere in evidence in 1910, but its principal architect, Adolph Hitler sat listening to what little Russian he knew wafting Trotsky’s table and lingering in the ambient.  The words “inferior” and “superior” were constant strains on nights when Professor and student talked intensely for hours between them.

One is justified in imagining the young Adolph Hitler a few tables away, reading Trotsky’s latest edition of The Spark, seething with impunity at the impunity with which these Russian fugitives were damning the Austro-Hungarian empire.

On other nights the young Adolph would have witnessed Alfred Adler at another table, in deep conversation with a Serbian named Dimitrije Motrinovic.  On such nights, Alfred Addler was pontificating at the adult’s table.  Dimitrije Motrinovic was no casual associate of Adlers. 

Motrinovic maintained a close, professional interest in Adler for decades following the Trotsky years.  Dimitrije Motrinovic and Adler became close enough intellectually for Adler to entrust the founding of the English branch of the Adler’s Society, a clique within the International Society for Individual Psychology.  Adler was eventually forced to part ways with Motrinovic for taking the Adler’s Society in a political direction Adler opposed.  So, there is no use in anyone arguing Alfred Adler was not an influence on Dimitrije Motrinovic.

Whether Alfred Adler knew that Dimitrije Motrinovic’s associate, Vladimir Gacinovic, was also an associate of Leon Trotsky or not, public domain sources do not make clear.  But what is known is that Motrinovic was to Gacinovic what Adler was to Trotsky, but perhaps more.

Both Motrinovic and Gacinovic were Serbian Nationalists but, more importantly, members of the Young Bosnia movement.  Skeptics of my scholarship will cry foul, owing to the fact the Young Bosnia movement did not exist when Motrinovic was pursing higher education, but the group founded by Motrinovic was the immediate antecessor of Young Bosnia.

Newcomers to the topic of World War I will be wondering why Motrinovic and Gacinovic matter at all.  Motrinovic and Gacinovic matter because it was Gacinovic who recruited and armed the assassins who murdered Archduke Ferdinand and his wife the Duchess of Hohenberg.

Why were the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife assassinated?  Because Adlerian psychology predicted the outrage in the soccer stadium following that terrible loss.

The assassinations which led directly to the outbreak of World War I were designed with the specific intent of triggering a war between Europe’s leading Monarchies, and that is precisely what occurred.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Alfred Adler’s after-hours instruction at the Café Central in Vienna led directly to the assassinations which started World War I.  Alfred Adler’s subsequent reaction inclines one toward my conclusion, that the Nutty Professor was oblivious to the intent of Trotsky and Motrinovic.

Adler found himself under intense scrutiny, as one might expect, following the Archduke’s assassination, and so broke all ties with his associates in Vienna emigrated to the United States and took up a research position in New York city.

I’d end our trip in the Way Back Machine here, but future events require I escort Alfred Adler to his early grave.  In 1933 Alfred Adler was attending a conference on psychology at a university in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he suffered a heart attack and died on the spot.

Regrettably, all that was known by Scottish authorities was that Alfed Adler was Jewish.  It is not clear if Scottish authorities knew Adler had converted to Christianity following the assassination of the Archduke in 1914.  Either way, it was determined Adler’s remains had to be interred according to Jewish custom, which required immediate burial or cremation. 

Adler’s remains were certain to be repatriated with his family in the New York, so Adler’s remains were cremated immediately, and his urn promptly misplaced.  Adler’s sudden death and posthumous disappearance has fueled more than one conspiracy theory among America’s Jews, and no more acutely than among New York’s Jewish community.

It has been speculated that Adler was recruited by and ‘disappeared” by British intelligence owing to his intimate knowledge of Leon Trotsky and Adolph Hitler.  While there is no denying that, of all the people in the world, Aldred Adler would have been instrumental in defending the Allied West against the propaganda services of the newly formed Soviet Union, and emergent Third Reich, the incompetency of British Intelligence leading up to World War II reinforces the impression Alfred Adler was utter dismissed if was in fact still alive.

Alfred Alder, in case you missed it, was not just the mastermind behind the Soviet Propaganda Machine overseen by Leon Trotsky in the 1920s and 1930s.  Alfred Adler was also the mastermind behind the NAZI Propaganda Machine overseen by Joseph Goebbels.

Alfred Adler’s “social psyche” was the fulcra on which the levers of both Soviet and NAZI propaganda operated.  In both Soviet and NAZI propaganda, narratives of a collective victimization and the hand of “others” repeatedly targeted the “inferiority complex” of the audience.  In both designs, Soviet and NAZI promises appealed to the “superiority complex” of the audience.

Incitement to stage a global war of extinction was the stated objective of both Soviet Socialism and National Socialism.

So uniform are the narratives, tactics and objectives of the Soviet Socialists and the National Socialists that one wonders why they conflicted at all.

I chalk that one up to the long nights the young Adolph spent eavesdropping on Leon Trotsky’s table at the Café Central in Vienna long ago.  The Russian word for inferior, “nizshiy”, and the Russian word for superior, “prevoskhodyashchy” lingered too long in Adolph’s drug addled mind.

If Adlerian psychology applies to Europe’s intelligentsia in the period leading to the Archduke’s assassination, as I insist it does, to the degree Adler’s “social psyche” exists at all, to that same degree will an explicit danger of narcotics use have pervaded accredited academia of the period.

I’ll spare my audience the gory details on narcotic induced psychosis, and here continue on to the next dot.  If the trenches of World War I were filled by the sadistic slight of mind exercised by a rogue faction of Europe’s intelligentsia, they were emptied only by the sheer exhaustion of all parties to the greatest and most futile bloodletting in human history.

On the pages of Pravda, Europe’s Nobility no longer deserved contempt.  The pages of Pravda, as could be expected, lay the blame for World War I squarely on the shoulders of the Royalty, Nobility, Aristocracy and Middle Class who failed to stop it.

Before concluding our trip in the Way Back Machine, I have one, final, tragic stop to make. 

Just before the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Austria’s Imperial Foreign Minister, Count Leopold Anton Johann Sigismund Josef Korsinus Ferdinand Graf Berchtold von und zu Ungarschitz, Frättling und Püllütz, was openly antagonized by Victor Adler – unrelated as far as I know – who insisted that open war in Europe would provoke a revolution in Russia. 

The Count famously responded, “And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein – a.k.a. Leon Trotsky – sitting over there at the Cafe Central?”

No, of course not.  Alfred Adler struck the spark that ignited World War I.  Alfred Adler’s protégé, Leon Trotsky, would strike the spark that ignited World War II.  But the Count’s familiarity with “Mr. Bronstein” informs historians that the Archduke’s agents were aware, yet dismissive of an existential threat in their midst.

Who could plausibly have taken a clique of opium smoking, café sipping chin scratchers like the Socialist International seriously.  I mean, these men were all convinced they had evolved into a superior species of intellect.  The more prolific mouths among them never left the café and were therefore deemed to be blowhards, a nuisance at best, a preface to a riot, perhaps, but a war?

Inconceivable.

In conclusion, while I cannot claim that World War I was made inevitable by Ibn Sahl’s miraculous lens, why can I not?  For where physical evolution was now the coin of the realm in the biology department, and because psychology dove immediately down that same said rabbit hole, the advent of psychological evolution was as inevitable as biological evolution.

The genie was out of the bottle.  Pandora had opened her box.  A pseudo-scientific delusion had mingled in the academic ambient, where it became infused with the thick, narcotic snoke of opium.  In that heady steam the inferiority complex and superiority complex of every narcissist among the world’s intelligentsia battled for their sanity and lost. 

The Proletariat were the specific precipitate Alfred Adler’s theories on psychology predicted.  How Alfred Adler could have missed that fact boggles the mind.  I believe that is why most historians are convinced Alfred was an operator of extraordinary prowess, an evil genius who mentored the greatest sadists in human history then calmly walked between the raindrops.

But I do not rest my case against psychology on an inferential association with the microscope.  Not at all.  While the agnostic Alfred Adler was busy spilling his guts at the Café Central, Sigmund Freud, the acclaimed Father of Neurology, was transfixed by the substantia nigra, the black stuff found in the human brain!

The substantia nigra.  The name alone primed the National Socialist Worker’s Party for a psychotic break.

Between 1886 and 1914, researchers made substantial progress toward understanding the significance of this region of the brain.  A small band of dark matter provided the only visible relief in examinations under the microscope, so, naturally, the substantia nigra drew all attention to itself.

In 1914, I diverge from social psychology to pursue a review of consensus among neurologists, at least for the duration of World War I.  I can’t bear going through World War I.   

I’ll assume everyone has heard of that catastrophe and now knows where and how the War to End All Wars began.

To the substantia nigra I now turn.