Part 2 of 25 in the The Philosophy of Future Inevitability series.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about the twentieth century's greatest monsters:

They were competent.

Not good. Not justified. Not redeemable. But competent. They rose to power, held power, and wielded power with extraordinary effectiveness. Hitler rebuilt a collapsed economy before destroying it. Stalin industrialized a peasant nation in a decade. Mao mobilized hundreds of millions.

We want evil to be stupid. We want it to be obvious. We want to believe we'd recognize it, resist it, never participate.

Milgram showed us we wouldn't.

The Milgram Problem

  1. Yale University. Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments.

The setup: participants were told they were helping study learning. They administered electric shocks to a learner (actually an actor) when he answered questions incorrectly. The shocks increased in intensity. The learner screamed, begged to stop, eventually went silent.

The shocks went from 15 volts ("slight shock") to 450 volts ("XXX"). The labels escalated: "moderate shock," "strong shock," "danger: severe shock," then just "XXX."

At 150 volts, the learner demanded to be released. At 300 volts, he stopped responding. The participant heard this. Knew this. Could stop at any time.

The experimenter had four escalating prompts:

  1. "Please continue."
  2. "The experiment requires that you continue."
  3. "It is absolutely essential that you continue."
  4. "You have no other choice, you must go on."

No threats. No punishment. Just authority saying continue.

The finding: 65% of participants administered the maximum shock—labeled "XXX" on the machine—when instructed by an authority figure in a lab coat.

Not outliers. Not psychopaths. Two-thirds of normal people. The percentage stayed consistent across replications, across cultures, across decades.

These weren't sadists. They were ordinary people—teachers, salesmen, engineers. They sweated. They trembled. They protested. But when the man in the coat said continue, they continued.

Some participants asked to stop. The experimenter said continue. They continued. Some laughed—nervous laughter, stress response. They continued. Some asked if the learner was okay. The experimenter said the shocks cause no permanent damage. They continued.

The Nazis were ordinary people following orders. This wasn't a metaphor. This was demonstrated science.

Milgram ran the experiments because he wanted to understand the Holocaust. How did ordinary Germans become executioners? The answer was uncomfortable: they didn't become anything. Ordinary people, in the right circumstances, obey authority even when authority directs harm.

The circumstance is the variable. The people are constant.

Arendt's Insight

Hannah Arendt covered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann—the architect of Holocaust logistics, the man who made the trains run on time to Auschwitz.

She expected a monster. She found a bureaucrat.

Eichmann wasn't ideologically fervent. He wasn't sadistic. He was a middle manager who wanted advancement. He found a niche—transportation logistics—and optimized it. That his cargo was human beings headed for extermination didn't change the organizational dynamics. He wanted to do his job well. His job was murder.

The banality of evil. Not evil as dramatic, recognizable, Other. Evil as mundane. Evil as careerism. Evil as the thing ordinary people do when the system rewards it.

The Competence Problem

Here's what makes this worse:

Evil-led systems can be highly functional. The Nazi economy recovered faster than democratic economies during the Depression. Soviet industrialization achieved in a decade what took other nations generations. The Chinese Communist Party has overseen the largest poverty reduction in human history.

This doesn't justify anything. The costs—millions murdered, freedoms destroyed, human potential crushed—vastly outweigh any gains. But the functionality is real.

Nazi Germany, 1933-1938:

  • Unemployment dropped from 6 million to 300,000
  • GDP grew 8% annually
  • Infrastructure projects employed millions
  • The Autobahn system was built
  • Industrial production doubled

How? Massive state spending. Rearmament. Forced labor. Expropriation of Jewish property. Deficit spending that would eventually require war to sustain. But in the short term: it worked. People had jobs. The economy grew. Hitler's approval was genuine.

Soviet industrialization, 1928-1940:

  • Steel production increased 400%
  • Coal production increased 500%
  • Electricity generation increased 700%
  • The agricultural economy became industrial

How? Forced collectivization. Labor camps. Artificial famines that killed millions. Terror. But the factories got built. The infrastructure got built. The industrial base that defeated Hitler got built on the bones of Stalin's victims.

We want to believe that evil systems fail. That tyranny is inefficient. That good governance and good morals align.

Sometimes they don't.

Tyranny can be extremely efficient when:

  • Opposition is eliminated (no dissent slows decisions)
  • Resources are centralized (state directs all investment)
  • Labor is coerced (strikes are impossible)
  • Externalities are ignored (environmental damage, human cost, long-term sustainability)

Democratic systems are constrained by dissent, rights, due process. These constraints protect people. They also slow things down. Tyranny removes the constraints. The speed increases. The people suffer.

Hitler's early economic success gave him legitimacy. Stalin's industrialization enabled victory in World War II. Mao's mobilization—when directed at things other than sparrows and intellectuals—built infrastructure that still functions.

Competent evil is more dangerous than incompetent evil. It delivers results. Results buy tolerance.

If Hitler had been incompetent, the German people would have rejected him early. If Stalin had failed to industrialize, the Soviet Union would have collapsed before World War II. If Mao had produced only famine without subsequent development, the Communist Party would have lost legitimacy.

The competence made the evil sustainable. The results justified the methods, in enough people's minds, for long enough, to let the system persist.

The Rand Steel-Man

Ayn Rand argued that productive people create civilization. The industrialists, the innovators, the makers. Society depends on their output. When they're constrained, everyone suffers.

There's truth here. Production matters. Innovation matters. The people who build things contribute more than they extract.

But Rand missed something: production is morally neutral.

The producer can produce weapons or medicine. The innovator can innovate surveillance or liberation. The maker can make goods or bads. Productivity doesn't equal virtue. It equals capacity.

Hitler was a producer—of war machines and racial ideology. Stalin was an innovator—of terror and forced collectivization. Mao was a maker—of famine and revolution.

Rand's framework celebrates capacity without questioning direction. Capacity to what? Toward what end? These questions matter more than the capacity itself.

Nietzsche's Shadow

Nietzsche saw it clearly: power operates beyond good and evil.

Not that morality doesn't exist—but that morality doesn't constrain power. Power does what power does. Morality is a story we tell afterward, or a constraint we impose from outside.

The will to power is real. Watch any organization, any hierarchy, any system where advancement is possible. People seek power. They rationalize seeking it. They believe their power-seeking serves good ends.

Hitler believed he was saving Germany. Stalin believed he was building socialism. Mao believed he was liberating China. Their beliefs were sincere. Their beliefs didn't make them right.

Sincerity is not virtue. Believing you're the good guy doesn't make you the good guy. Every villain is the hero of their own story.

The Pattern

What do mass atrocities have in common?

A legitimizing ideology. Nazism, communism, nationalism, religion. Something that makes the atrocity make sense. The targets aren't people—they're enemies, vermin, obstacles to utopia.

The ideology does specific work:

  • Dehumanization. The targets aren't like us. They're pests. Parasites. Threats. The language shifts from "people we disagree with" to "infestation to be eliminated."
  • Utopian justification. This suffering is necessary for the greater good. For the thousand-year Reich. For the workers' paradise. For national security. The end justifies the means.
  • Historical inevitability. This is how history moves. This is necessary. This is destiny. Resistance is futile and morally wrong.
  • Victim inversion. We're the real victims. They attacked us. They threaten our existence. Our violence is self-defense.

Once the ideology is established, the atrocity becomes logical within that frame. People who accept the frame accept the conclusion. The ideology is the load-bearing structure.

Institutional apparatus. Atrocities at scale require organization. Logistics. Middle managers. People doing their jobs. The system is bigger than any individual. No one is fully responsible because everyone is partially responsible.

The Holocaust required:

  • Transportation. Trains scheduled. Routes planned. Timetables coordinated.
  • Logistics. Camps built. Supplies procured. Personnel assigned.
  • Record-keeping. Arrivals documented. Possessions catalogued. Deaths recorded.
  • Medical personnel. To select. To experiment. To dispose.
  • Guards. To control. To punish. To execute.
  • Bureaucrats. To process paperwork. To manage budgets. To report metrics.

Thousands of people doing specialized tasks. Most of them never saw the full picture. The train scheduler knew trains. The supply officer knew supplies. The record-keeper knew records.

The system diffused responsibility. Everyone was following orders. Everyone was doing their job. No individual felt fully responsible. The collective action produced atrocity.

Incremental escalation. It never starts with gas chambers. It starts with rhetoric, discrimination, small cruelties normalized. Each step makes the next step possible. By the time the endpoint is visible, the path there seems inevitable.

Nazi Germany, step by step:

  1. Rhetoric. Jews are different. They're a problem. (1920s-1933)
  2. Legal discrimination. Nuremberg Laws. Jews lose rights. (1935)
  3. Social exclusion. Boycotts. Violence. Kristallnacht. (1938)
  4. Ghettoization. Forced relocation. Concentration. (1939-1941)
  5. Mass shooting. Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe. (1941)
  6. Industrial extermination. Gas chambers. Death camps. (1942-1945)

Each step was justified by the previous step. "They're already in ghettos, why not camps?" "They're already being shot, why not optimize?" The path was incremental. The endpoint was unimaginable from the beginning.

Elite consensus. The people who could stop it don't. Business leaders, military officers, professionals—they accommodate. They benefit. They convince themselves it's temporary or necessary or not their problem.

German business leaders funded Hitler's rise. They wanted labor discipline, anti-communism, rearmament contracts. They thought they could control him. They couldn't. But by the time they realized, they were complicit.

Military officers knew the regime was murderous. They participated anyway. Some because they believed in the cause. Some because they wanted advancement. Some because refusal meant death or disgrace.

Professionals—doctors, lawyers, engineers—adapted. They joined the party. They participated in the system. They told themselves: if I don't, someone worse will. If I don't, I lose my position. If I don't, I endanger my family.

All true. All rationalizations. All enabled the system.

Why This Matters Now

We're not immune.

The conditions that enabled twentieth-century atrocities aren't unique to that century. Legitimizing ideologies exist now. Institutional apparatus is more sophisticated than ever. Incremental escalation is happening in multiple countries. Elite consensus toward accommodation is visible.

This isn't prediction. It's pattern recognition.

The people who participated in atrocities didn't see themselves as evil. They saw themselves as doing their jobs, protecting their families, serving their nations, following legitimate authority. They weren't morally different from you.

They were you, in different circumstances.

The Lesson

Evil doesn't announce itself. It arrives in uniforms you respect, speaking language you understand, offering solutions to problems you have.

It's competent. It delivers results. It makes the trains run on time, at least for a while.

Hitler arrived promising economic recovery and national restoration. He delivered both, initially. Stalin arrived promising industrialization and socialist utopia. He delivered industrialization. Mao arrived promising national liberation and peasant empowerment. He delivered liberation from foreign occupation.

The evil came packaged with genuine benefits for some people. This is how it always works. The legitimacy is earned through performance, not just propaganda.

The way to resist isn't to believe you would obviously resist. Milgram showed you probably wouldn't.

65% continued to maximum shock. You probably think you'd be in the 35%. Statistically, you're probably wrong. And the 35% who stopped—they still went pretty far. The median stopping point was "intense shock" (300 volts). Only a small minority stopped early.

Even the resistors mostly resisted late. Even the refusers were partially complicit. The pull toward obedience is strong. Stronger than you think.

The way to resist is to understand the patterns. To recognize legitimizing ideologies when they emerge. To notice incremental escalation before it escalates further. To refuse elite consensus toward accommodation.

Practical implementation:

Watch the language. When a group of people gets described as infestation, parasite, vermin, cancer—this is dehumanization. It's preparatory to violence. Resist the language before the violence starts.

Notice the increments. When each new restriction is justified by the previous one, you're in escalation. "We already did X, so Y is reasonable" is the pattern. Break the pattern early.

Distrust elite accommodation. When business leaders, intellectuals, professionals say "we can work with this"—they're rationalizing. They see benefit for themselves. They're discounting harm to others.

Remember Milgram. You're not immune to authority. When someone in a position of legitimacy tells you to continue, you'll probably continue. Knowing this doesn't make you immune. But it lets you notice it happening.

And to accept, uncomfortably, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Including yours.

You're not a better person than the Nazis. You're a person in better circumstances. Put in their circumstances—economic collapse, national humiliation, authoritative leadership, legitimizing ideology—you'd probably do what they did.

This isn't self-hatred. This is accurate self-assessment. The people who participated in atrocities weren't morally different from you. They were psychologically similar, situationally different.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao were not aliens. They were humans who found the conditions for their worst impulses to flourish.

Those conditions can recur. Are recurring. Will recur.

Economic crisis. Political polarization. Legitimizing ideologies. Elite accommodation. Incremental escalation. These conditions exist now. In multiple countries. Including yours.

The question is whether we recognize them.

Most people didn't recognize them in 1933. Or 1917. Or 1949. They thought their situation was different. Their leader was different. Their cause was justified. Their violence was defensive.

They were wrong. We might be wrong too.

The pattern recognition is the defense. Imperfect, but better than nothing. Know the pattern. Watch for the pattern. Resist the pattern early.

Because once it escalates far enough, resistance becomes impossibly costly. By the time the camps are visible, objection means death. You resist early or you accommodate.

Choose early.

Previous: Wooden Boats and Strange People: A Brief History of Human Ambition Next: Dulles the CIA and the Fentanyl Problem

Return to series overview