A lecture given to the Reinhold-Schneider-Gesellschaft, printed in Church, Ecumenism and Politics, by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (NY, Crossroads, 1987), pp. 165–79.:
"In his Conversations with Hitler Hermann Rauschning, president of the senate of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk) in 1933 and 1934, reports the dictator saying the following to him: "I liberate man from the constraint of a spirit become an end in itself; from the filthy and degrading torments inflicted on himself by a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the claims of a freedom and personal autonomy that only very few can ever be up to." [1]
For this man conscience was a chimera from which man must be liberated; the freedom he promised would be freedom from conscience. It fits in with this that Goering told the same author: "I have no conscience. My conscience is called Adolf Hitler." [2]
The destruction of the conscience is the real precondition for totalitarian obedience and totalitarian domination. Where conscience prevails there is a barrier against the domination of human orders and human whim, something sacred that must remain inviolable and that in an ultimate sovereignty evades control not only by oneself but by every external agency. Only the absoluteness of conscience is the complete antithesis to tyranny; only the recognition of its inviolability protects human beings from each other and from themselves; only its rule guarantees freedom."
PS: O apelo à sobrevivência e prevalência da "consciência" sobre qualquer fonte de poder humano que cai ha tentação da "hubris" (a anulação do individuo e da comunidade perante comandos politicos e não civis - contratuais) está também ou deve estar no cerne do "ethos" liberal.
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