All people are flawed but we are not flawed equally. There are many axes that can be drawn along moral and ethical dimensions and each one of us will fall at different points along them, having different strengths and weaknesses. It is next to impossible to extract an overall single score that would define our ethical and moral worth for comparison purposes, unless one decides to pick one axis as determinative over all the others. Doing so is what enables some people to feel morally superior to others. But even then, while it is hard to do that for positive values, there can be a particular moral and ethical dimension where someone is so bad that it overrides everything else and we can conclude that they are simply bad people, even if they have some redeeming qualities in some area. Sociopaths fall into that category.
As an extreme example, this Wikipedia page quotes a contemporaneous pro-Nazi children’s magazine about Hitler thusly:
“Do you know that your Führer is a vegetarian, and that he does not eat meat because of his general attitude toward life and his love for the world of animals? Do you know that your Führer is an exemplary friend of animals, and even as a chancellor, he is not separated from the animals he has kept for years?…The Führer is an ardent opponent of any torture of animals, in particular vivisection, and has declared to terminate those conditions…thus fulfilling his role as the savior of animals, from continuous and nameless torments and pain.”
Hitler was also apparently very health conscious and did not smoke or drink.
Even taking those claims at face value, I think that most of us would say that while these qualities are generally admirable, they by no means neutralize his horrendous attitudes towards Jews, the Roma people, Poles, and other ethnic groups that he and the Nazis considered inferior and condemned to death. In other words, where he stands according to that axis alone is sufficient for us to say that it does not matter if the scores on measures on the other axes are generally positive. He was a terrible person.
We can similarly conclude that it does not matter if Jeffrey Epstein was a philanthropist who gave a lot of money in support of science. He was a bad person. The same goes for the Sackler family. The fact that they gave a lot of money to the arts and universities does not neutralize the awful consequences of the way they pushed opioids on the public. Whatever else Jeff Bezos does, the terrible effect his business practices has had on so many people dominates over everything else. The same holds for war criminals or oligarchs who made themselves rich by inflicting suffering on so many people. It is not hard to conclude that they are all bad people.
But with ordinary people it is not easy to make a simple summative overall conclusion like that because we are a mixture of good and bad, and we should try to make judgments only along appropriate axes.
I must admit that when I read your headline, the first thought that came into my head was of the plural of “axe” instead of the plural of “axis”, so I was very curious where you would go with that.
Hitler was also apparently very health conscious and did not smoke or drink.
Hitler was so health conscious he woke up every morning with a shot of amphetamines, and went to sleep with a dose of opiates. His doctor was shooting him up with doses that would have made a 70’s rock star wince.
I don’t think Hitler’s being vegetarian or a goofball junkie made much difference to his larger personality flaws.
[There is a popular book on nazi drug use, Blitzed that is a fun read. Booth’s Opium: A History has a better coverage of famous junkies in history. Did you know Paracelsus was a pusher? Yeah, it’s fun stuff. Marcus Aurelius’ meditations were written while he was smashed, etc.]
Marcus@2: “Hitler was so health conscious he woke up every morning with a shot of amphetamines, and went to sleep with a dose of opiates. His doctor was shooting him up with doses that would have made a 70’s rock star wince.”
Too bad propofol hadn’t been invented yet. [Yes, that’s a tacky Michael Jackson reference.]
Mano (quoting the Nazi magazine): “Do you know that your Führer is . . .“. Just substitute the word “Savior” for “Führer” and one realizes (if one already didn’t) just how much of a religious cult it was/is.
#1 johnson
Perhaps a foray into DnD!
I think whether or not you believe that depends on how much he was offering.
I never liked the concept of good and evil. Seldom do things line up that simply in real life.
There used to be an extended story, perhaps about or originating in China, about good and bad things and how it is difficult to know which is which over time. The example being that a boy falls off his horse and breaks his leg, and the commentator says that this is surely bad, but the story teller says to not judge too fast because a day later the local warlord combs the countryside to raise an army and the boy was rejected because of the broken leg. The commentator then announced that this is good only to be warned not to judge too fast because the lack of one warrior meant the just and fair local warlord was replaced by a cruel despot. And so it goes back and forth with good coming from bad and bad coming from good.
There isn’t really that much real identifiable evil. Christians point to Satan and Satanist point out that they don’t really believe in a personified Satan or harming people. The irony being that it is only the Christians who believe in Satan. (Or in the tattoo trope: “Satin”. LOL)
Hitler’s humanity is an interesting study. I wish I had the time and energy to chase it back to original sources. After reading a few secondary sources and papers, credible sources I think, the key understanding for me was that Hitler seemed to be hung up on the concept of ethnicity. The idea that there are core ethnicities and all history is a fight for dominance and survival of these ethnicities. That this was the larger cause and conflict. A battle so profound that all other boundaries were meaningless.
This explains a lot. It explains why Hitler didn’t very strongly identify as a German. Or, more correctly an Austrian. He was an Aryan. Which struck me as odd because the Aryans, as a group, started in India/Iran. I guess when making up mythology details don’t much matter.
It also might explain Hitler’s animosity to the Jews. Over simplified, the Jews were a stateless people of all ethnicities. The exception that “proves”, or grossly contradicts, the supposed reality. Jews were in most nations, of most races, and, at least sometimes, marginally accepted in most ethnicities.
This understanding seemed to effect his judgment. His delay and holding back with the British had an ethnic component. His disrespect for ethnic Slavs, the term related historically to “slave”, meant his armies were needlessly cruel. Which hardened resistance and may have been one of the reasons the German army was turned back at the gates of Moscow. Hatred, and artificial concepts like ethnicities, make people irrational and ineffective.
The Hitler story seems more tragic and narcissistically self-serving than evil. His mind apprehended a concept and it seemed, to him, to explain so very much. It gave him a cause and a purpose. He used the flaws in the German psyche to bend a nation to his will. Overlooking his own flaws and the simple truth that while the concept of ethnicity is interesting, it is entirely artificial and a dead end.
This is all very much “out there’. But note that this concept of ethnicity is the single most important concept in understanding the attraction of the American right and Russia. Russia is seen as compatible with their ideology. An authoritarian Christian (patriarchal, anti-gay, anti-feminist), white supremacist, pro-gun nation with a large military and lots of nuclear weapons surrounded by non-Christian brown people. Sound familiar? What’s not to like. Hugs and hand shakes all round.
But back to evil.
I just don’t see much evil. I see a whole lot of narcissism and short-term thinking. I see a whole lot of ‘othering’ and fearmongering used to gain political advantage. Loads of greed. Lust for power. But very little unalloyed evil. Yes, there is a lot of needless harm to others and consequential suffering but all of it is happening while people are focused on “me and mine” while discounting those outside their tribe. I see a lack of empathy but no great desire to harm. Harm is a byproduct of the greed and desire for power, not an end in itself.
Even the most seemingly malevolent equivocate, discount or ignore the harm they do. Reveling in the suffering of others is a very short phase for most people. Even sociopaths, generally, just don’t care.
I guess I just don’t spend enough time around the criminally insane. Another educational opportunity lost because of the Reagan administration. There used to be asylums. Now they walk the streets and inhabit the boardrooms. But always in disguise.
I guess his love of animals is why Nazi scientists used human subjects. I have a photo locked in my memory of a Jewish prisoner with the top of his skull removed. It made quite an impression -- I was 11 when I visited that concentration camp.
Smokers call me a “smoking nazi” for my anti-smoking views. They repeatedly compare all anti-smokers to Hitler.
I politely remind them that they are the ones running the gas chambers.
Intransitive@8: “I politely remind them that they are the ones running the gas chambers.”
HaHaHaHaHa. How does one politely remind someone that they are the ones running the gas chambers?
Values change within subcultures, too. The Sacklers are a good example of this. In some subcultures the mere fact that they made a lot of money and used some of it to employ other people would be a point in their favor. I don’t happen to hold that view and I doubt it would be very popular among other readers of this blog. I don’t think I can ignore that it exists, however, because it’s a root cause of misunderstandings between me and people who are more money focused.
Also, it’s probably worth noting that most people don’t have the opportunity to take actions that show us what kind of people they are. The actions of Jeff Bezos have shown that he’s fine with actions that generate more profit for him but cause pain and suffereing for the people who are helping him make his money. And on top of that he’s willing to double down and make excuses for it so he doesn’t even have to admit that’s what he’s doing. I would like to say I don’t have any attitudes of that sort but I doubt there’s any way for Mano or any other readers of this blog to know that. Even friends that know me in person wouldn’t really know. My claim that I wouldn’t choose profit at the expense of widespread suffering is therefore indistinguishable from Bezos’s doubled down excuses as a purely practical matter.
I don’t mean that to excuse what Bezos does. I’ve avoided shopping at Amazon for many years specifically because I don’t like the way they treat their employees. But it’s worth remembering how complicated this is. If we try to simplify it too much we get spherical cow problems. Spherical cows are fine for physics problems but bad for planning the architecture of a dairy farm and frankly when evaluating good and evil we’re well into farm country here. Also, I’ve personally known people who would cheerfully take the same trade-off Bezos did or even go farther. They just lacked the opportunity to do so.
The rightwing sudden love for Russia confuses me. When I was growing up, conservatives would call people they didn’t like Communists (well, they still do, so there’s that…) and were very anti-Soviet Union. Popular culture tried in the 1980s to show the people weren’t the government. Movies like White Nights, Moscow on the Hudson, and others provided examples of regular people who were sympathetic and likeable, and being oppressed by the government.
lorn@#6:
Hitler’s humanity is an interesting study. I wish I had the time and energy to chase it back to original sources. After reading a few secondary sources and papers, credible sources I think, the key understanding for me was that Hitler seemed to be hung up on the concept of ethnicity. The idea that there are core ethnicities and all history is a fight for dominance and survival of these ethnicities. That this was the larger cause and conflict. A battle so profound that all other boundaries were meaningless.
Hitler got a lot of his racial theories from American pseudo-scientist and racist freak Madison Grant, author of The Passing of The Great Race. Grant was the guy who cooked up the whole “aryan” thing, and spent a lot of time promoting the nordics. Hitler wrote, of Madison Grant, that his book was “like a bible to me.”
For some reason, American schools don’t teach much about the origins of Hitler’s goofy theories regarding race. I can’t imagine why.
Marcus Ranum @12
Madison grant was certainly a source, I haven’t read POTGR but there were excerpts. Even in small doses it is amazing to see how wrong someone can be while still seeming to make sense. Scary to see seemingly normal people adopt obvious nonsense as a core of their thought. Particularly if those ideas shine a favorable light on their self-image. Lots of all that going around today.
(I greet my neighbor with a hearty “Drink and interesting pee lately?”)
I found it revealing that Hitler took US post-reconstruction history as a guide. The terror and Jim Crow laws were proof it could be done. He loved Henry Ford. And, of course, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) were pure inspiration.
It is almost banal to note that, with Hitler, Trump, and most authoritarians, the ideas are not usually their own. Typically they are synthetists and offer only small improvements and embellishments.
I will have to get a copy of Madison grant’s “POTGR”.
Oh, look it’s available on-line:
https://archive.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft_djvu.txt
Looks like it could use some formatting and I’ll have to refer back to the Wikipedia page for the graphics but I can do this … but wait … another format.
photocopy of the book:
https://archive.org/details/passingofgreatra00granuoft
Grand. I like it when thing work out.
Oh, Dog … the prefaces by Henry Fairfield Osborn are nearly insufferable … ” compelled us to recognize the superior force and stability of heredity, as being more enduring and potent than environment.” … and so it goes.
If I should start goosestepping around my living room I trust someone will have the common decency to hit me with a shovel.
I will have to get a copy of Madison grant’s “POTGR”.
I have a first edition. I figured that if I was going to read shit, it may as well be tony shit. Besides, any money made by printing it was long gone.
It’s amazingly bad. I have spent a few hours going over it trying to find a point, other than just “white people of english ancestry are great!” It has to be seen in the context of the flood of pseudoscience that was belching forth at the time. Grant’s effect on government policy (US, not Germany) was substantial. They really took him seriously, like he was the Jordan Peterson of his time.
It’s an embarrassing book.
I had no idea it was that influential:
“”The Passing of the Great Race,” in its original form, was designed by the author to rouse his fellow- Americans to the overwhelming importance of race and to the folly of the “Melting Pot” theory, even at the expense of bitter controversy. This purpose has been accomplished thoroughly, and one of the most far-reaching effects of the doctrines enunciated in this volume and in the discussions that followed its publication was the decision of the Congress of the United States to adopt discriminatory and restrictive measures against the immigration of undesirable races and peoples.”
If I remember right one of the obstacles to Jews entering the US while fleeing Nazi Germany was some relatively recently passed laws. Same laws? Clearly the same bigotry.
I wonder how influential this book has been to present day white supremacists? Some of the thoughts and phrasing is nearly word-for-word 1924 to 2022.
I wonder how influential this book has been to present day white supremacists?
It’s where “replacement theory” comes from.
All of the nonsense about “mixing the blood” comes feom there, too.
I can’t say Grant had a “theory” -- the whole book is an aimless froth of unsupported assertions, alternately saying nice things or nasty things about this population or the other. It’s tragic stupidity because it dances around the dawning realization that humans are all close relatives -- and from Africa. Give it a read and you’ll find little thought-turds that stuck in Hitler’s mind throughout. It’s not just antisemitism, it’s supremacist -- all that stuff about master races and bloodlines comes from there.
It needs to be pointed out that it wasn’t just ethnic groups. There were homosexuals, mentally ill (presumably an uncle of my mother), and probably more.
I’m pretty certain Hitler (nominally a Catholic) saw himself as a savior, perhaps even the second coming.
I believe there’s also wording in Mein Kampf (probably copied from somewhere) that’s almost word-for-word identical to Creationist slogans, such as the usual description of kinds. He also hated Darwin and had his books burned.
It’s all connected.
The Atlantic has a good piece on Grant and TPOTGR: [atlantic]
Marcus @2 — Dude, you’re hitting on two of my favorite things. Drugs and history. Specifically, the history of humans getting fucked up, it’s amazing the variety of things people will ingest to get a head change.
Perhaps not as extreme as some of the examples given, but I wince every time I hear one of our politicians use the phrase “my good friend on the other side” when that friend on the other side, who may not be a mass murderer, is still responsible for making policy decisions which negatively effect the majority of Americans.
Marcus Ranum @16: “I can’t say Grant had a “theory” — the whole book is an aimless froth of unsupported assertions, alternately saying nice things or nasty things about this population or the other.”
I’m having to read this book in small doses but, well into it, I have yet to see any substantive proof of his main assertion that character traits are genetic and/or permanent and durable. So far he just says it works that way and seems entirely convinced that no proof is needed, and that everyone reading it will assume this is correct. It is tacitly, viscerally, and intuitively obvious. To hear this idea is to accept, know, and love this idea. No actual logical proof or testing of this assumption is required.
This is like Thurston Howell the III (Gilligan’s Island) telling us that “breeding shows” and all the people around him at the country club nod knowingly and muttering hear-hear before sipping a mint julep and taking a pull on the cigar they lit with a hundred-dollar bill. It challenges my digestive fortitude.