I think the base rate of Hitlers might be really high, like 10% or more, depending on circumstances. If you look at pre-WWII times, or colonial times, there sure were a lot of world leaders that did horrible things. But world leaders are just people with power. The proportion of people without power, who would do horrible things if given power, is probably similar.
And that’s disregarding the base rate of other evil that we commit, like tolerating factory farming. So once you start fantasizing about ancestor sim reeducation camps, oh man. If that’s really the plan, guess I’d better prepare to end up in such a camp too!
Willingness to tolerate or be complicit in normal evils is indeed extremely common, but actively committing new or abnormal evils is another matter. People who attain great power are probably disproportionately psychopathic, so I wouldn’t generalise from them to the rest of the population—but even among the powerful, it doesn’t seem that 10% are Hitler-like in the sense of going out of their way commit big new atrocities.
I think ‘depending on circumstances’ is a pretty important part of your claim. I can easily believe that more than 10% of people would do normal horrible things if they were handed great power, and would do abnormally horrible things in some circumstances. But that doesn’t seem enough to be properly categorised as a ‘Hitler’.
I think the base rate of Hitlers might be really high, like 10% or more, depending on circumstances. If you look at pre-WWII times, or colonial times, there sure were a lot of world leaders that did horrible things. But world leaders are just people with power. The proportion of people without power, who would do horrible things if given power, is probably similar.
And that’s disregarding the base rate of other evil that we commit, like tolerating factory farming. So once you start fantasizing about ancestor sim reeducation camps, oh man. If that’s really the plan, guess I’d better prepare to end up in such a camp too!
Willingness to tolerate or be complicit in normal evils is indeed extremely common, but actively committing new or abnormal evils is another matter. People who attain great power are probably disproportionately psychopathic, so I wouldn’t generalise from them to the rest of the population—but even among the powerful, it doesn’t seem that 10% are Hitler-like in the sense of going out of their way commit big new atrocities.
I think ‘depending on circumstances’ is a pretty important part of your claim. I can easily believe that more than 10% of people would do normal horrible things if they were handed great power, and would do abnormally horrible things in some circumstances. But that doesn’t seem enough to be properly categorised as a ‘Hitler’.