Nuremberg trials - Nazi leaders achieving genius level scores on IQ tests

Nuremberg trials - Nazi leaders achieving genius level scores on IQ tests

Did anyone ever think they were stupid? Evil and imperialistic sure, but not stupid.

I always find these binary assessments so bizarre. Yeah, you can be really smart and also be a mass murderer. And no, you don't have to be mentally ill to kill people. You can just not fucking care or decide on an unorthodox set of priorities. You don't have to think Jesus speaks through your toilet brush.

Nuremberg trials

I recently debated this with a friend who was surprised that I, as a pretty lefty, liberal guy was commenting that I wished I knew smart people who worked in gov intelligence or international affairs. His comment was that anyone who works for a government with as dubious practices as the US is stupid. Either a. because they are dumb enough to believe they can change things from within or b. aren't thinking long-term about the ill-effects on humanity.

Intelligence and ethics don't have to connect at all. I think it's just a coping mechanism people have. Like the need to quantify these pseudo-scientific terms like, okay, he was really brilliant but EMOTIONALLY he was retarded!

No, he just didn't agree with you. That, in fact, is much, much more frightening.

What I hate most about this attitude is that it dehumanizes these people into "monsters", and so you can end up believing that a "regular human" could never become this sort of person that commits atrocities. Hitler was a normal guy. Most of the Nazis were.

Nuremberg trials

If you don't accept that regular humans can do incredibly evil things then it makes you less wary and less cautious.

 "Oh Hitler was just evil and mentally ill, there's no way modern day politicians could do similar things!" It's a bad attitude to have, though very understandable.

Interestingly, as far as I know Hitler was "nice" to some stuff, like, he loved animals, children, respected women (which was also a part of Nazi propaganda as far as I know), he wasn't "good" but he wasn't a evil dragon sitting on his pile of gold.

Some say that Hitler had issues with women. He was pretty kind to animals though.

In general during that time, women were expected to be homemakers. In Germany, unlike most other European (and America) countries, where this was just taken as a reality, the Nazis celebrated it, and rewarded it. Really the social pressure to "breed" was more the strong gender roles that era had, rather than some anomaly which was specifically German.

Nuremberg trials

They didn't have a gun pointed at their head but the societal National Socialist view of what a woman should be consisted of having racially pure children and lots of them.
Basically being a homemaker with no other job besides giving birth.

Nearly every society in the world at that time viewed the division of labor between men and women as the male doing the factory/office work and the woman doing the homemaking and baby making. I don't view this as unique.

Furthermore, the change away from that was due more to technology than some kind of great enlightenment. With washing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners, and such things, there was less housework to be done.

That freed women up to do other things.