The Cost of Bad Ideas

 An Introspection Inspired by “Come and See”

The rise of Nazi Germany is attributable to many bad ideas, but two stand out as being uniquely costly. One, the silly notion of an Aryan super-race. Two, the equally silly notion of a global Jewish conspiracy suppressing said super-race. The result of both beliefs taken together reanimated widespread anti-Semitism, or more simply Jew-hatred.

The cost of Jew-hatred in the second world war is such a staggeringly high number that it is worth putting into perspective. Six million. A modern cruise ship holds around 6,000 people. Imagine 1,000 cruise ships full of Jewish victims. A large college football stadium holds around 100,000 people. Imagine 60 such stadiums full of Jewish victims.

But how does this tie into our discussion on The Beginning of Infinity? For starters, it is worth remembering that Jew-hatred existed prior to the incarnation of the Nazi party. This leads to the inevitable question, why the Jews? There are likely many reasons, but two that Thomas Sowell focusses on are the success of Jews in general and the role they played in abstract financial transactions severing as middle-men. Success of Jews led to resentment among less successful peers. And the abstract ways Jews made money led to suspicion in a culture whose notions of productivity involved physical objects. We’ll get to jealously a bit later in this piece. For now, let’s stay with abstractions.

It would be a gross exaggeration to blame the Holocaust on a lack of appreciation for abstract ideas, but if we take Sowell’s analysis seriously it does seem that such a mindset certainly didn’t help the circumstances Jews found themselves in during the 20th century. Had European sentiment around abstract financial matters been more open minded, and the Nazis more open minded on bad race theories, perhaps history would have been different. But, alas, the history is perfectly clear that such open mindedness did not take place.

But today’s movie has little to do with Jew-hatred in particular. Our film follows a young boy as he joins a group of resistance fighters in Belarus. Scenes throughout the film capture the brutal murder and destruction of whole groups of people as the Nazis sweep through Europe. It’s final scene depicting the slaughter of an entire village is only a glimpse into the larger war path the Nazis carved through the country. Well over 600 such villages were destroyed in Belarus during the second World War.

There is no sense in giving a film like this some kind of score. It is absolutely worth watching, because of how terrifying the film is. In our context of The Beginning of Infinity, it is worth watching for another reason, aside seeing the consequences of closed-mindedness. This other reason is the consequences of a zero-sum perspective of the world.

One only needs to look at Hitler’s second book – his essays on foreign policy – to understand that his fear of a zero-sum planet played a prominent role in shaping his world view. The world has finite resources, so naturally the races must compete for them.

Taking into account this zero-sum mindset and Jew-hatred, the events of the Holocaust seem – on retrospect – to have been unavoidable. But as we learn from reading David Deutsch, that is not true. At any time, better ideas could have undermined the Nazi regime. All it would have required is that people under the Nazi spell open their minds to arguments against their beliefs.

But the ideas of the Nazi party were rather pernicious, in that they both promoted violence and closed mindedness. And this is perhaps the most important conclusion we can draw from this horrible episode in world history. Borrowing Deutsch’s definition of irrationality, memes that DISABLE the holders’ critical faculties, we see the evil that perpetuated from Nazism was due to that fact that their ideology was irrational. Challenge the party and you wound up in jail or dead. Again from Deutsch, we have that all evil comes from lack of knowledge. So it stands to reason that perpetuating evil results from preventing knowledge growth.

Nazism: zero-sum, closed minded, and violent. This is a deadly ideology in any circumstance. But coupled with a foundation of Jew-hatred present in Europe at the time, it was a powder keg for one of the largest wholesale slaughters of human life in the history of our species. But there is much cause for hope about the future. As Deutsch shows us in his book, with good ideas any problem is soluble.

Our fate, as best I can tell, is almost entirely dependent on the human race adopting an ideology that promotes positive sum development. Not only does this provide a more realistic perspective of the situation we find ourselves in – a universe full of resources that are valuable given the right knowledge - it also has the benefit of reducing violence. We don’t have to see human existence as a competition between ourselves. Competition may arise from time to time, but there is also innovation and exploration. 

Peace through prosperity. Prosperity through technology. Technology through knowledge. And knowledge through good and ever-improving explanations.

Our future is not zero sum. Our future is infinite, and it is just beginning.

References:

https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/estimated-number-of-jews-killed-in-the-final-solution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweites_Buch#Habitat_argument

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2019/05/21/the_socialist_overtones_that_underlie_anti-semitism_103749.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ2ZpF_U53U

(Thomas Sowell (Hoover Institution, 2005 on C-SPAN))

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulqBb4JePuQ&t=321s

(Milton Friedman on Jewish economic success)