The next Hitler

The recent year has led to a lot of Hitler rhetoric. Personally, I think it's a bit overblown, but I also think we need to be very careful with our application of history's greatest figure of cartoon evil. The problem with Hitler (well, other than the obvious) is that he's too easy. The effect of this on rational debate is relatively well known, but I'd like to focus on the perhaps more important job of recognising the actual next Hitler when they come along.

This comes down to a problem with label-based thinking. It's easy to feel like you have learned a lot because you've figured out how to put the right labels on things but, while it does reflect a kind of knowledge, you can't use it to generate new labels. For that, you need to figure out how the labels ended up where they did in the first place. Which is to say, it's all very well to know the Nazis are evil, and it might be useful to loudly proclaim the evilness of whichever present-day boogeypersons are expedient, but all this grandstanding is going to have very little power at predicting or stopping actual evil.

I don't believe that the next Hitler is going to stand behind a podium and wave his arms around a lot while talking about locking up minorities, for the same reason that the next big computer worm isn't going to involve pictures of Anna Kournikova; the conditions that led to the last Hitler aren't the same, and the memetic weaknesses that allowed him to flourish aren't the same. Locking up minorities is still bad, of course, and it's worth condemning people who advocate it, but the path from here to genocidal world domination is pretty tenuous.

So what does the next Hitler look like? Well, the real problem is that the next Hitler isn't going to be a Hitler at all, because you only get to become a Hitler after the fact, in the cartoonish labelling machine of history. Present-day evil is more nuanced, and more acceptable. At the time, I'm sure Hitler was an affable chap, perhaps a little dangerous but ultimately manageable. Present-day Hitler will be the same, not the monster we learn about, but the regular person he was back then.

The problem is if we're too busy looking for the cartoon, we might not recognise the live-action version when we see it.