The not-so-great theory of great men

The original incel, Adolf Hitler, doing poses in 1925

There is one issue that has been bugging me for quite some time, and that is the tendency to call terrible people in history great, if not outright, then as a partially explanation for their rise to power (it is mostly power-people that get this label).

Even when there might be broad consensus that the person up for discussion was horrible, we tend to rationalize how such a beast could succeed by saying that certain traits to them that were exceptional, otherwise how would they have ever come into such power in the first place, right?

While very human, this is an error of thought, in my humble opinion, and I am as guilty as anybody. Nothing about you need to be great to become leader of a nation for example. Let me explain.

In one way this way of thinking is linked to the so-called “Great man theory”, a theory that roughly asks the question: Would world history have been more or less the same without extraordinary individuals, or are the individuals merely seen as extraordinary because of the surroundings they were in that allowed them to take their places in history? (Although I know that this is not exactly how it is defined in academic circles).

One of those related questions commonly debated is: Would World War II have happened without Hitler, or was the situation in Germany so flammable in the 1920’s and 30’s that some other person would have taken the role of Hitler and we would have more or less had the same situation anyways?

Just to deal with the standard question first, the premise for that question is not the best: If you take it to the one extreme and say that it is all the individual that does it, that means that you think that Hitler could have risen to dictatorship through a democratic process in a un-traumatized, peaceful country with no history of war and no racial biases and basically no fundamental wounded pride and hatred and feelings of injustice – basically you would think that Hitler could rise to power in the Smurf’s village.

This is clearly wrong, Hitler was famously a nobody up until the first world war, he wasn’t particularly young either at the time, so he had time to fail and fail again – he is very much a result of his circumstances (we discuss this in the episode The Year That Changed Hitler).

But taken to the other extreme saying that individuals don’t matter in history is also clearly wrong – of course individuals can change the course of history, either it is individual stupidity or genius, one moment of brilliance or recklessness, that of course can have enormous impact, especially if you are a person with a lot of power.

No, the real purpose of this post is to discuss the language we use – me included – and that we tend to fall into the trap thinking that there must be something there – I mean, you don’t manage to rise to be the leader of an entire people if you are a complete schmuck, right?

Let us rewind a bit: The “Great” people in history are often political leaders, be it presidents, monarchs, emperors, prime ministers, dictators and so forth. That means that we should measure them as such. And don’t get me wrong: A lot of political leaders have been fantastic; I am of course not saying that all political leaders are horrible.

The question we really should ask ourselves is: What is the measurement of success for a political leader - is it the amount of stability? Is it the happiness of your people? Is it wealth? Is it being able to keep the peace? Is it level of individual freedom? The right to worship what religion you like?

It probably depends on who you are, but to be fair – for most people living under a leader I would think these KPI’s would be high up on the list. And at the bare minimum, you would expect a good leader not to get you and your family killed.

What annoys me is when we fall for the temptation and say about for example Hitler: “He was a great opportunist”. And I realize that opportunist is not necessarily a positive word, but still I sense that we here are implying that – “of course Hitler was horrible, but boy could he rile up those German crowds” or “boy could he take a chance when he saw it”.

That is in my mind not only misunderstanding Hitler, it is also our own bias shining through, it is the all too human tendency to think that because someone is standing on a pedestal you automatically draw the conclusion that they must have somehow earned it or must somehow be - if not great – then at least have some talent.

I find that to be a very dangerous misconception indeed. We so easily fall in love with the person on the big stage, no matter how they stumbled up there.

Today I see polls of people in social media (albeit being on the quite far right) thinking that Hitler is made up to be worse than he really was (by that bloody mainstream media, right!?) or people saying that “yeah, he was bad, but he got stuff done”.

It is similarly disturbing to see people on the American far right admiring Putin for having such a tight grip on power. There is one thing that we tend to forget with so-called “strong” dictators like this: They are always terrible to their neighbors, but they are even worse to their own populations.

Putin’s Russia is gravitating towards another of the top losers in world History, Josef Stalin, at least by our mentioned success parameters of what makes a good leader.

Stalin managed to kill off 9 million of his own people, and at the time of his death had about 3 million more in Gulags. Add to that that he played a huge role in starting the entire second world war with the Nazi’s through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact you get one of the biggest human disasters in history.

“But he was a great father of the Soviet Union”, some might say. No. He absolutely was not. That was what he got printed on posters, showing him smiling with kids. He was a very sad, paranoid man that spiraled into a pattern where he could trust no-one and frequently had to kill off people just to keep himself in power, and essentially keeping himself alive.

Back to Hitler. He was a politician. He was awful at it by all possible key parameters you would use on what makes a political leader great, he is up there with the very, very worst. That shouldn’t be very controversial.

Focusing on other qualities other than those needed to be a good leader is absurd, and is a bit like saying that the swimmer finishing 150th out of 150 at the Olympics, that almost drowned halfway in the pool and had to be pulled up, isn’t all that bad – in fact: did I tell you that he is pretty good at knitting mittens? Frankly – it doesn’t matter.

But what matters is what language we use, because language and wording hold a lot of power. And I think I might be at fault for calling Hitler both a good gambler and possibly also a good orator, I now think neither.

Let us derail to what is going on now, let’s talk Donald Trump. Trump gathers thousands of supporters for rallies; gatherings where he mumbles, talks about absurdities, asks people to do directly harmful things to themselves (bleach!), talks about his golf and makes stuff up that even those in the crowd would know to be wrong – would you call Trump a great orator because he has thousands standing there with red baseball hats on?

Trump of course think Putin is smart, he has said so straight out. Putin, that now has tarnished every trade link to the Western World, has to sell his raw materials at highly discounted prices, in practice is about to make Russia an economic vassal of China, which international partners are quickly getting reduced to Iran and North-Korea and some smaller countries in Africa, that has killed, wounded raped and kidnapped hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians – but has yet killed far more of his own people in the process, and has some out-bombed strips of land in Eastern Ukraine to show for it, that also sooner or later will be lost to him as foreign help is finally coming back to Ukraine again.

“The smartest one gets to the top” Trump said in 2022.«I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions, I’d say that’s pretty smart. He’s taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”

Again, by all parameters available to us, economy, employment, foreign politics, ability to keep peace (January 6th for example) … Trump is another horrible, horrible politician. They can’t be measured by the number of fanatics believing their lies (and boy - we can all easily become fanatics). And like with many of these other players it is worth asking the question: Are they doing a lot of this because they feel they have no choice? That they are too deep in? That they know that if I stop now I will either be in jail or killed?

Trump clearly understands he will be imprisoned if he loose, Putin knows he will likely get killed if he doesn’t keep on pushing his glorious plans – because he himself has started this spiral of killing people not “being up for it”. Hitler had basically a point of no return after the Night of the long knifes (if not long before) and Stalin … don’t get me started. Once you’ve gone down that path you’ve created the rules of your own game, and if you stop playing – that will mean someone else will likely pick it up. Our perception of them might change quite a bit that instead of being “strong” we realize that their driving force might be fear.

The sad reality is that even with the so-called “great men”, that all of a sudden find themselves on the big stage, is that from time to time some huge dimwits will be stumbling up there, and surprisingly many people might still applaud that. And sometimes these terrible leaders will of course also grab a lot of attention.

Not only do you not need to be smart to get your hands on vast amounts of power, but you can also be surprisingly stupid. You might also need to be ruthless and evil, with a whiff of psychopathic personality disorder in order to get there, and you might need a lot of “luck” and the cards stacked just right for you.

The point is: let us from here on try to be more careful before we allude to that the biggest monsters in world history have anything “great” about them. Let’s not be Donald Trump thinking that “the smartest one gets on the top”, let’s make “great” great again.

Other related listening: The Nazi-Soviet Conspiracy