If we present man with a concept of man that is not true, we will corrupt him. When we present him as an automation of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which man is in any case prone. I became acquainted with the last stages of corruption in my second concentration camp: Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing more than the product of heredity and environment or as the Nazis like to say, "of blood and soil." I am absolutely convinced the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry of defense or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
-Viktor Frankl
