You're a Nazi
Peter's Denial
Stanley Milgram wanted to know how atrocities happen.
I used to box with a guy from Bosnia called Dino. No idea whether or not that was his real name. Nicknames are common in boxing clubs and so he might’ve just shown up one day in a Flintstones shirt and got stuck being called a purple dinosaur. Who knows. He was a nice guy. I’d describe him as “greasy.” He had that middle-aged Eastern European dad build that is somehow both flabby and also capable of prolonged outbursts of violence. He had incredible cardio. Smelled of onions.
After practice one day we were sitting around the locker room and somehow the question of how he’d come to America came up. He was reluctant to talk about it but after some prodding we learned that he’d fled to the USA after the Bosnian Genocide.
“Things happen sometimes.” He said with a shrug. “I did what I had to do.”
That was the end of it. I leave it to the reader to ponder what that means.
So, how genocides happen is something of a conundrum. Afterall, most people that we meet on this Earth seem pleasant enough and even the unpleasant ones we would hesitate to call “Evil.” Somehow though, pogroms, camps, ethnic cleansings, and mass murder are all fairly common, so much so that we might call them a staple of the human condition. Crime is one thing, and reams of paper have been written about the psychology of the criminal. Genocides though… well, the problem with genocides is that the people who commit them are usually relatively normal. They’re law abiding. Fairly “straight-laced”. Not given to mental illness or antisocial behavior. We could go so far as to say that genocides are most often committed by people who are boring. Hannah Arendt described this pointedly when she coined the phrase, “The Banality of Evil”, and it really does seem like most of the worst things that ever happen, happen in a boring, methodical, and almost mechanized way. By the 1960s the banality of evil and all its implications had started to really bother people. For the first time, people really wanted to stop and try and understand the Holocaust.
Now, the 1960s seems a bit late for that I grant you. If you look back over the history though it really does seem to be the case that The Holocaust was scarcely spoken of or mentioned much until twenty or thirty years after the war. Shock probably. With distance comes clarity. Afterall, nobody emerged from the war with their hands clean and even the allied countries had done their fair share of, to put it mildly, “ethically ambiguous warfare.” The U.S.A. had, for example, dropped two atomic bombs on cities full of women and children and I think it took roughly until everyone who was directly responsible started to die before we were willing to look back at how awful everything had gotten. The Academic Class got there earlier of course and had been wrestling with the horrors of World War 2 for a while, but even as late at the 1970s it would not have been uncommon for the average Westerner to have never heard the term “Holocaust” or to be unfamiliar with the treatment of the Jews. I must say that I don’t know if The Holocaust rising to such a high level in the public consciousness since then has been a net benefit for understanding atrocities, as the common perception today seems to be, “For No Reason, millions of Germans briefly went insane.” Back in 1961 though, Milgram posited another explanation. One that has been sidelined from public discourse largely, I think, because it is so chilling. Milgram asked, “What if human beings really are just animals who ‘Follow Orders’?” “What if the Nuremberg defense was somewhat valid?” “What if the vast majority of people have next to no ability to refuse commands from a superior?” “What if we actually don’t have agency?”
…
What if that?
So he designed an experiment.
Three people. Milgram himself as the experimenter, a paid actor as the False Subject, and a random person off the street, the actual, real test subject of the experiment. The Real Subject would be lied to. Made to think he was helping Milgram evaluate the paid actor’s performance in a variety of memorization and learning tasks. Milgram would ask the paid actor (whom the person off the street was mistakenly led to believe was the actual test subject) a series of questions to see how well he’d memorized sets of data and, whenever the actor got one wrong, Milgram would instruct the man off the street to press a button, giving the actor an electric shock.
Now, the shocks weren’t real of course. The man’s buttons weren’t actually connected to anything. Nonetheless, the actor’s job was to yip and contort himself as convincingly as possible when the buttons were pressed, trying to make the man off the street believe he was causing actual pain. As the exam progressed, the man was instructed to use other buttons, each allegedly delivering electric shocks of higher and higher voltage until the actor was crying and pleading for mercy while convulsing on the floor. As the experimenter, Milgram’s job was the assure the man off the street that everything was normal. That the actor was okay. That he knew perfectly well what he was doing and that above all, for the sake of the experiment, the man ought to continue pushing those buttons.
…
Even despite the bloodcurdling screams.
What would you do in such a situation? What would you do if an Authority figure, a doctor or a scientist or a priest or a politician, told you that harming someone else was required. That it was your duty. That progress demanded it.
Well, statistically, 35% of you would torture the man for hours, and the other 65% would keep going until he died.
That’s what would happen.
We actually know this.
It’s science.
Milgram’s experiment has been repeated many times all over the world with men and women from all backgrounds, belief systems, and age ranges, and has been repeated over many decades.
That’s what you, average Joe or average Jill, would do. Being a good Muslim doesn’t prevent it. Praying the rosary doesn’t prevent it. Reading philosophy or expressing yourself through art doesn’t prevent it. Not even being a Jew prevents it or makes you any less likely to participate.
You, right now, are a Nazi.
We can kinda-sorta scientifically prove it.
You see, words are just sounds people make. They don’t mean anything. Hard pill to swallow but 99.9% of everybody have no solid beliefs or convictions and every opinion they share with you ought be considered a message written on water. People change with the wind. Whatever “The Crowd” thinks they will also think, and Crowds more or less think only what Authority tells them. If you think you’re different and that this doesn’t apply to you… you’re almost certainly wrong. We can prove that. We can prove that because you more or less hold all the Opinions of your time. Correct? I mean, what? Did you come to hold the same positions as everyone else on the planet through enlightened reasoning? Did you decide to conform to everybody else through rigorous analysis of the facts and data?
No.
Today, everyone thinks slavery is bad. Few hundred years ago, everybody thought it was good. In 2025 nobody’s religious. In 1327 everyone was. Twenty years ago the consensus was that gays couldn’t get married. Today even the Conservatives are gay dads with surrogate kids. Very, very importantly… none of this matters. None of it makes a difference. None of it means anything. All of it, every last drop of consensus opinion, is as subject to reinterpretation and change as everything that came before it. The Herd has no solid ground. Nothing will be saved. Everything will be lost. From the standpoint of agency, almost every human being on earth is a non-entity. As Jung said, the sum of many zeros is still zero, and even though we assemble ourselves into great crowds and factions and make sweeping Democratic movements, all of it is nothing other than the migrations of reindeer. All of it nothing more than a bunch of animals following whomever they think’s in front.
Covid proved this. The idea that men can have babies proved this. The mantra that riots in front of enormous fires are “mostly peaceful” proved this. Just recently I watched an entire army of conservatives who spent the last ten years complaining about “globalism” suddenly get jingoistic about taking over the globe. Wasn’t the whole complaint that you wanted less people competing with you for housing and jobs? No? You actually want more people? Oh. Right. By “America First” you actually meant, “Annex Canada.” My mistake. See, the leader moved a different way, and they all did too. That’s it. That’s all it is. Nobody believes anything. Human “thought” is just a complex game of Follow the Leader. When a Man or Woman speaks, typically all they say is “Baaaa.”
Why does a Zebra have stripes?
You ever think about that?
I mean, they live on the African Savannah and being a high-contrast black and white animal is piss-poor camouflage in a world of brown and green. But you see, Zebras can’t hide in the brush or against the trees. Like humans, they’re too big and awkward for that. The Zebra, rather, is camouflaged against the herd. The survival strategy is for all the individuals to blend together in a sea of interlacing stripes. The lion loses focus on which one it’s trying to attack. The sick, the weak, the old… they all get lost in a binary sea of black and white.
And that’s why you feel embarrassed when you trip.
It’s why don’t like public speaking and…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Holy is He Who Wrestles to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.