‘After observing Hitler in the flesh, Carl Jung remarked that he seemed like “an automaton, like a robot or a mask of a robot.” He never laughed, he only sulked. “He seemed as if he might a double of a real person and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix and that Hitler the man might be hiding index, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism.” This reaction was not so surprising since what he really was, Jung opined, was the cavity into which the Germans had projected their own selves, ‘that is the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans.’ That was what made him so powerful. He was like a man ‘who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source, and then acts upon them.”’

From ‘I Dream with Open Eyes’ by George Prochnik.

I guess many politicians need to become a cavity, in order to get re-elected.

And even though this book is not about Hitler nor about Jung, the idea that the demagogue is the unconscious of the people, who sometimes behave like scum, is still accurate.