Michael Vassar hit upon something which I think is probably more key than rationality: Charisma.
Hitler had goals, and by the means he had at his disposal, he was highly rational in achieving those goals (this does not mean that he was rational in the sense of being sane). I also recall from hearing my Great-Great Uncle talk about meeting Hitler once, that he said the man could talk a person into anything (he also related how devastated he was when he learned of how evil the man was. Of course, just not liking Jews was not considered to be exactly evil in much of Europe at the time either). Please, do not read this as apologizing for Hitler’s actions. It is just a statement that he was a very skilled personal operator, and as someone later has stated, he managed to get other people to do his work for him.
That seems to be the MO of almost all politicians: To be able to personally charm those they meet, and then subtly suggest “You can help me if you go out and tell others about my GRAND PLAN” (Wasn’t there a post about The One Big Theory? This seems to be among the tools of the politically motivated. That they have One Big Theory that will “fix it all”).
That “One Big Theory” is so appealing to most people that they are willing to overlook the failures of the theory in order to feel god. It is exactly like a drug.
Hitler had goals, and by the means he had at his disposal, he was highly rational in achieving those goals (this does not mean that he was rational in the sense of being sane).
What is the meaning of “sane”, then? Conforming to the majority?
What is the meaning of “sane”, then? Conforming to the majority?
That does seem to be how it is used in practice. Modified in the direction of ‘conforming to the will of the most powerful’. It is, of course, a lot harder to be ‘insane’ when you are rich or well connected.
It is, of course, a lot harder to be ‘insane’ when you are rich or well connected.
How I wish that this were not the case (well, maybe it isn’t, but it sure does seem to be so).
Michael Murdock comes to mind. Rich, powerful, and has a values system that seems to run so contrary to the greater good, and even though it may seem to be conforming to a majority (although I do not think it actually is) it could be said to be just as insane as Hitler (although perhaps less psychotic—The jury is still out on that one though).
But, to reign it back in a little bit. Murdock has a system of beliefs whereby he is pursuing a course of action based upon those beliefs. Some would define that as rational. Yet, he is influencing what is seen as sane by modifying what is seen as:
conforming to the will of the most powerful’
This may seen completely tangential, but Michael Murdock was the very first thing I thought of when I saw that comment (which led directly into GW Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and so forth...) These people created a definition of sanity that includes such things as marginalizing those who have pursued a path of what this site defines as Epistemic Rationality (and any sort of behavior that is seen as Intellectual, or Academic), marginalizing those who do not conform to a similar belief system (rather than attempting to reach a consensus with those who disagree, attack them as being evil), and those who do not conform to a religious ideology that supports the definitions of evil mentioned before...
Agh! I am so angry now that I cannot remember what my point was. Earlier tonight, I had to defend a very intelligent 14 year old against his own “friends” (He is the son of my best friend) who were all castigating him as having been indoctrinated into atheism (even though he refuses to accept their definition of his beliefs or lack of them), and many other completely irrational and hateful things…
I will come back to this post when I can remember my point, because I swear there was one.
(I keeping this post intact so that I will be able to recall my original thoughts as well)
These people created a definition of sanity that includes [...]
Created? This is a good description of most people in most places at most times, throughout history. Better to think of them as countering the historically, geographically and (even today) demographically small and abnormal phenomenon of rationality, pursuit of truth and tolerating dissident opinions.
Oh! Good point. I guess that I need to define that a bit better. Yet, I am not certain how to word it.
Conforming to the Majority might be one was of defining sanity, as would conforming to what we think of as moral (moral sanity).
Yet, ultimately, I think that I used the wrong word there. I think that I need to look for a new word or definition. His rationality did not conform to the norms of society as a whole, and his rationality was based upon a foundation that did not make sense outside of his insular world.
So, maybe the conforming to the majority is a good definition. I need to think about that
His rationality did not conform to the norms of society as a whole, and his rationality was based upon a foundation that did not make sense outside of his insular world.
If his “insular” world is taken to include Greater Germany, where many (possibly most) people agreed with his views, it’s not all that insular.
I am referring more to the elite crowd of yes-men with which he surrounded himself. especially later in the war.
From what I have been told by my family (some of whom were in Germany and Fought on the side of the Nazis), not everyone was aware of the extent to which Hitler was prepared to take the country in order to achieve his goals. His public face differed from that he showed in Private. His public face was that of a much saner person than was his private face.
It was his private world that I am referring to as Insular, based entirely upon the stories I have been told about what it was like to have lived through that time, and which did not make sense to those outside of that world once they became aware of it.
You are correct though, that pretty much all of Germany was behind the man, and cooperated with his goals. I know that my Uncle had not read Mien Kampf until the end of the War, and related that had he (and many of his friends) read it earlier, they might have been more reluctant to support Hitler. He related it to how many people read the Bible. They tend to skip over the bits that conflict with their personal values and only read the bits that confirm what they already believe.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, but in the ancestral environment of tribes of 100 or so people, being able to negotiate alliances, curry the favors of those in power, and attract mates were essential qualities for survival and reproduction.
Something that’s often overlooked in this context is that it’s not these qualities themselves that are adaptive, but the ability to analyze your surroundings and learn how to develop them. In other words, we didn’t evolve charisma as much as the ability to develop it.
The benefits to having charisma are obvious. I’m wondering about the benefits of being under the spell. Having a property (x) that leads people to follow you is way beneficial for survival. But how is it that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic x. Presumably it is some kind of proxy for competence in the ancestral environment. Or a side effect of something else.
You are looking at it backwards. It’s not that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic X, it’s that people evolved to exploit human psychology to get people to follow them. There are not necessarily any benefits to being under the spell. Compare: predators evolved to have hunting skills, but that doesn’t mean there are benefits for the prey to being hunted.
There are sometimes very large benefits to “being under the spell”. It’s most obvious in military contexts, where signaling disloyalty is likely to be fatal.
It might be a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. If others are voting to follow the leader, the minority who don’t suffer. If the majority doesn’t follow any leader, a small clique that does follow benefits.
That is a very good question. One guess might be that being under the spell affords one the safety to breed (see the birds above). If they allow the more dominant bird to protect them, then they have more opportunity to breed safely (or gather food and eat, or stay safe themselves and not get eaten, as the dominant more charismatic will draw the attention away from the less obvious)… Just guesses though.
Safety to breed? Kind of.* I think you’re all missing the obvious...
The template of the charismatic person is the idealist thinker who wants something better for mankind. Think Yuri Zhivago. (Lenin.) Hitler. They’re not tricking us: we have the ability to recognize that they really believe in their ideas, and that they are willing to sacrifice all that is necessary to realize those ideas. Our trust in their ability to realize their ideas may be misplaced, and of course our trust in their ideas may be misplaced.
The “spell” though is the ideas they represent. If you want to explain why we follow, you just need to explain our idealistic tendencies; our ability at times to sacrifice our time, money, even our lives and all our other values for an idea. A charismatic person is someone who is able to stir up our innate idealism in the direction of their chosen ideals.
*Idealistically, I can think of the most idealistic leaders as the altruists willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause while the masses are busy raising their families...
I don’t know… My Younger sister (she is a zoologist and mathematician) says that Birds can exhibit traits that might be primitive forms of charismatic behavior. Certainly among male birds there are all manner of display and currying favor behaviors. And, in some flocking birds, the most dominant males will seek out positions that place themselves in danger in order to protect the rest of the flock. These birds often have shorter life spans, yet have more offspring.
I’ll have to ask her more about this, and see if she has an Evo Biologist on staff that might have more info.
Michael Vassar hit upon something which I think is probably more key than rationality: Charisma.
Hitler had goals, and by the means he had at his disposal, he was highly rational in achieving those goals (this does not mean that he was rational in the sense of being sane). I also recall from hearing my Great-Great Uncle talk about meeting Hitler once, that he said the man could talk a person into anything (he also related how devastated he was when he learned of how evil the man was. Of course, just not liking Jews was not considered to be exactly evil in much of Europe at the time either). Please, do not read this as apologizing for Hitler’s actions. It is just a statement that he was a very skilled personal operator, and as someone later has stated, he managed to get other people to do his work for him.
That seems to be the MO of almost all politicians: To be able to personally charm those they meet, and then subtly suggest “You can help me if you go out and tell others about my GRAND PLAN” (Wasn’t there a post about The One Big Theory? This seems to be among the tools of the politically motivated. That they have One Big Theory that will “fix it all”).
That “One Big Theory” is so appealing to most people that they are willing to overlook the failures of the theory in order to feel god. It is exactly like a drug.
What is the meaning of “sane”, then? Conforming to the majority?
Ability to not believe things that are blatantly obviously false.
That does seem to be how it is used in practice. Modified in the direction of ‘conforming to the will of the most powerful’. It is, of course, a lot harder to be ‘insane’ when you are rich or well connected.
How I wish that this were not the case (well, maybe it isn’t, but it sure does seem to be so).
Michael Murdock comes to mind. Rich, powerful, and has a values system that seems to run so contrary to the greater good, and even though it may seem to be conforming to a majority (although I do not think it actually is) it could be said to be just as insane as Hitler (although perhaps less psychotic—The jury is still out on that one though).
But, to reign it back in a little bit. Murdock has a system of beliefs whereby he is pursuing a course of action based upon those beliefs. Some would define that as rational. Yet, he is influencing what is seen as sane by modifying what is seen as:
This may seen completely tangential, but Michael Murdock was the very first thing I thought of when I saw that comment (which led directly into GW Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and so forth...) These people created a definition of sanity that includes such things as marginalizing those who have pursued a path of what this site defines as Epistemic Rationality (and any sort of behavior that is seen as Intellectual, or Academic), marginalizing those who do not conform to a similar belief system (rather than attempting to reach a consensus with those who disagree, attack them as being evil), and those who do not conform to a religious ideology that supports the definitions of evil mentioned before...
Agh! I am so angry now that I cannot remember what my point was. Earlier tonight, I had to defend a very intelligent 14 year old against his own “friends” (He is the son of my best friend) who were all castigating him as having been indoctrinated into atheism (even though he refuses to accept their definition of his beliefs or lack of them), and many other completely irrational and hateful things…
I will come back to this post when I can remember my point, because I swear there was one.
(I keeping this post intact so that I will be able to recall my original thoughts as well)
Created? This is a good description of most people in most places at most times, throughout history. Better to think of them as countering the historically, geographically and (even today) demographically small and abnormal phenomenon of rationality, pursuit of truth and tolerating dissident opinions.
Oh! Good point. I guess that I need to define that a bit better. Yet, I am not certain how to word it.
Conforming to the Majority might be one was of defining sanity, as would conforming to what we think of as moral (moral sanity).
Yet, ultimately, I think that I used the wrong word there. I think that I need to look for a new word or definition. His rationality did not conform to the norms of society as a whole, and his rationality was based upon a foundation that did not make sense outside of his insular world.
So, maybe the conforming to the majority is a good definition. I need to think about that
If his “insular” world is taken to include Greater Germany, where many (possibly most) people agreed with his views, it’s not all that insular.
I am referring more to the elite crowd of yes-men with which he surrounded himself. especially later in the war.
From what I have been told by my family (some of whom were in Germany and Fought on the side of the Nazis), not everyone was aware of the extent to which Hitler was prepared to take the country in order to achieve his goals. His public face differed from that he showed in Private. His public face was that of a much saner person than was his private face.
It was his private world that I am referring to as Insular, based entirely upon the stories I have been told about what it was like to have lived through that time, and which did not make sense to those outside of that world once they became aware of it.
You are correct though, that pretty much all of Germany was behind the man, and cooperated with his goals. I know that my Uncle had not read Mien Kampf until the end of the War, and related that had he (and many of his friends) read it earlier, they might have been more reluctant to support Hitler. He related it to how many people read the Bible. They tend to skip over the bits that conflict with their personal values and only read the bits that confirm what they already believe.
What is the ev psych explanation for charisma?
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, but in the ancestral environment of tribes of 100 or so people, being able to negotiate alliances, curry the favors of those in power, and attract mates were essential qualities for survival and reproduction.
Something that’s often overlooked in this context is that it’s not these qualities themselves that are adaptive, but the ability to analyze your surroundings and learn how to develop them. In other words, we didn’t evolve charisma as much as the ability to develop it.
The benefits to having charisma are obvious. I’m wondering about the benefits of being under the spell. Having a property (x) that leads people to follow you is way beneficial for survival. But how is it that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic x. Presumably it is some kind of proxy for competence in the ancestral environment. Or a side effect of something else.
You are looking at it backwards. It’s not that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic X, it’s that people evolved to exploit human psychology to get people to follow them. There are not necessarily any benefits to being under the spell. Compare: predators evolved to have hunting skills, but that doesn’t mean there are benefits for the prey to being hunted.
There are sometimes very large benefits to “being under the spell”. It’s most obvious in military contexts, where signaling disloyalty is likely to be fatal.
It might be a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. If others are voting to follow the leader, the minority who don’t suffer. If the majority doesn’t follow any leader, a small clique that does follow benefits.
That is a very good question. One guess might be that being under the spell affords one the safety to breed (see the birds above). If they allow the more dominant bird to protect them, then they have more opportunity to breed safely (or gather food and eat, or stay safe themselves and not get eaten, as the dominant more charismatic will draw the attention away from the less obvious)… Just guesses though.
Safety to breed? Kind of.* I think you’re all missing the obvious...
The template of the charismatic person is the idealist thinker who wants something better for mankind. Think Yuri Zhivago. (Lenin.) Hitler. They’re not tricking us: we have the ability to recognize that they really believe in their ideas, and that they are willing to sacrifice all that is necessary to realize those ideas. Our trust in their ability to realize their ideas may be misplaced, and of course our trust in their ideas may be misplaced.
The “spell” though is the ideas they represent. If you want to explain why we follow, you just need to explain our idealistic tendencies; our ability at times to sacrifice our time, money, even our lives and all our other values for an idea. A charismatic person is someone who is able to stir up our innate idealism in the direction of their chosen ideals.
*Idealistically, I can think of the most idealistic leaders as the altruists willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause while the masses are busy raising their families...
I don’t know… My Younger sister (she is a zoologist and mathematician) says that Birds can exhibit traits that might be primitive forms of charismatic behavior. Certainly among male birds there are all manner of display and currying favor behaviors. And, in some flocking birds, the most dominant males will seek out positions that place themselves in danger in order to protect the rest of the flock. These birds often have shorter life spans, yet have more offspring.
I’ll have to ask her more about this, and see if she has an Evo Biologist on staff that might have more info.