meowzician
Community Member
- MBTI
- INFJ
- Enneagram
- 4w5
“Every time an INFJ is born, the gods flip a coin, and the world holds its breath.”
When we think about the many dictators in world history, we see a certain pattern. What they desire is power. They desire it so much that they will seize it. Their focus is on keeping or even expanding that power. They often have a paranoia that those close to them are competitors, and they will purge their inner circle a la Stalin. And they have a strong will to survive. Think of how Saddam Hussein was found in that rat hole. I’m going to give this pattern a name—the logic of power.
But not every tyrant falls into the usual pattern. I hear you saying, “Well, of course. I mean, not every dictator is going to follow the pattern on every single point.” But what if there were a monster who was different on EVERY point? That when we view him through the lens of the logic of power, he makes no sense? He seems mad?
Hitler did not come into power through any coup d’etat but was democratically elected. While he did conduct one purge (Night of the Long Knives), it was not out of paranoia or a sense of competition. Rather it was a highly pragmatic decision that enabled him to gain efficient control of the army. The truth is that the same men he worked with in the 1920s, Goebbels, Göring, Hess and others, were still with him right up until his death. And of course, he committed suicide.
The one thing about Hitler that has always baffled historians is that he made really stupid strategic errors. As the tide turned against Germany, instead of diverting resources from the Final Solution to fund the war, he did the very opposite. The trains desperately needed to transport soldier to the front were monopolized by the SS to transport Jews to the death camps. The worse the war went, the more effort he focused the Final Solution. In the last hours before Germany fell, the slaughter of Jews rose to a frantic, feverish pitch. Why?
It is because Hitler didn’t follow the logic of power. He followed the logic of idealism. Simply put, Hitler’s focus was not Hitler. Hitler’s focus was the MISSION.
Most tyrants will find a scapegoat, a disliked group whose influence he can exaggerate, a convenient “enemy” whose sole purpose it is to help him consolidate power, whether it is Trotskyists or “immigrants from shit countries.” It is so common, that most people simply assume that this is what Hitler was doing.
That would be a mistake. Hitler was a true believer. He was completely convinced of the pseudoscience of race and absolutely believed that the Jews were a dangerous scourge, indeed that Jews were the most dangerous threat on the entire planet.
Unlike most dictators who are narcissists and psychopaths, Hitler was a true idealist. Just as he had compassion for animals (he was a vegetarian), he had enormous compassion for the German people, who had suffered unimaginably under the Weimar republic. In his mind, the only reason Germany lost WW1 was the betrayal of Jews.
For the record, Germany’s Jews were almost completely assimilated. They thought of themselves as Germans first and Jews second, and they were extraordinarily patriotic. A larger percentage of German Jews enlisted during WW1 than the percentage of ethnic Germans who enlisted.
But the antisemitic trope that Jews are disloyal predated the 20th century. Many Germans, including Hitler, couldn’t believe that Germany had lost the war militarily. They couldn’t imagine the German army being defeated on the battlefield. That’s fertile ground for a conspiracy theory. And the Jews? Given their already existing and unearned reputation for being disloyal, the Jews (along with the communists) became the convenient “stab in the back” explanation.
When you take an INFJ, and you destroy their moral compass with something like the Dolchstoßlegende, you create a monster.
As INFJ’s, it is so easy for us to see our connection to Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi, to Jesus and Buddha. It is deeply disturbing to realize than in our ranks are also Osama bin Laden, Robespierre, and… Hitler. And if you think that is hard on you, keep in mind that I am not just INFJ. I’m also a Jew. Use that INFJ empathy to try and imagine the horror I feel. I need you to, because this is just something I’ll never be able to put into words.
Two weeks ago, I sat down with my granddaughter and her father, and we had the antisemitism talk. As conversations tend to meander, ours touched on my idealism. My granddaughter knows who I am. She knows it is my intent to fight back, and she is worried that I may end up hurt, or even dead. I looked at her and said, “I have no intention of dying. I plan to do everything I can to stay alive. But if it comes down to that, Bubbelah, if I’m killed, it’s okay. It’s okay. There are some things worth dying for.”
Now, compare that to a YouTube video I watched yesterday of an informal interview with a Hezbollah terrorist. The most chilling thing about that interview was not that he wanted me (and all Jews) dead, although, yeah, that was hard to handle. The most chilling thing was that he believed his mission was worth dying for.
“Every time an INFJ is born, the gods flip a coin, and the world holds its breath.”
When we think about the many dictators in world history, we see a certain pattern. What they desire is power. They desire it so much that they will seize it. Their focus is on keeping or even expanding that power. They often have a paranoia that those close to them are competitors, and they will purge their inner circle a la Stalin. And they have a strong will to survive. Think of how Saddam Hussein was found in that rat hole. I’m going to give this pattern a name—the logic of power.
But not every tyrant falls into the usual pattern. I hear you saying, “Well, of course. I mean, not every dictator is going to follow the pattern on every single point.” But what if there were a monster who was different on EVERY point? That when we view him through the lens of the logic of power, he makes no sense? He seems mad?
Hitler did not come into power through any coup d’etat but was democratically elected. While he did conduct one purge (Night of the Long Knives), it was not out of paranoia or a sense of competition. Rather it was a highly pragmatic decision that enabled him to gain efficient control of the army. The truth is that the same men he worked with in the 1920s, Goebbels, Göring, Hess and others, were still with him right up until his death. And of course, he committed suicide.
The one thing about Hitler that has always baffled historians is that he made really stupid strategic errors. As the tide turned against Germany, instead of diverting resources from the Final Solution to fund the war, he did the very opposite. The trains desperately needed to transport soldier to the front were monopolized by the SS to transport Jews to the death camps. The worse the war went, the more effort he focused the Final Solution. In the last hours before Germany fell, the slaughter of Jews rose to a frantic, feverish pitch. Why?
It is because Hitler didn’t follow the logic of power. He followed the logic of idealism. Simply put, Hitler’s focus was not Hitler. Hitler’s focus was the MISSION.
Most tyrants will find a scapegoat, a disliked group whose influence he can exaggerate, a convenient “enemy” whose sole purpose it is to help him consolidate power, whether it is Trotskyists or “immigrants from shit countries.” It is so common, that most people simply assume that this is what Hitler was doing.
That would be a mistake. Hitler was a true believer. He was completely convinced of the pseudoscience of race and absolutely believed that the Jews were a dangerous scourge, indeed that Jews were the most dangerous threat on the entire planet.
Unlike most dictators who are narcissists and psychopaths, Hitler was a true idealist. Just as he had compassion for animals (he was a vegetarian), he had enormous compassion for the German people, who had suffered unimaginably under the Weimar republic. In his mind, the only reason Germany lost WW1 was the betrayal of Jews.
For the record, Germany’s Jews were almost completely assimilated. They thought of themselves as Germans first and Jews second, and they were extraordinarily patriotic. A larger percentage of German Jews enlisted during WW1 than the percentage of ethnic Germans who enlisted.
But the antisemitic trope that Jews are disloyal predated the 20th century. Many Germans, including Hitler, couldn’t believe that Germany had lost the war militarily. They couldn’t imagine the German army being defeated on the battlefield. That’s fertile ground for a conspiracy theory. And the Jews? Given their already existing and unearned reputation for being disloyal, the Jews (along with the communists) became the convenient “stab in the back” explanation.
When you take an INFJ, and you destroy their moral compass with something like the Dolchstoßlegende, you create a monster.
As INFJ’s, it is so easy for us to see our connection to Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi, to Jesus and Buddha. It is deeply disturbing to realize than in our ranks are also Osama bin Laden, Robespierre, and… Hitler. And if you think that is hard on you, keep in mind that I am not just INFJ. I’m also a Jew. Use that INFJ empathy to try and imagine the horror I feel. I need you to, because this is just something I’ll never be able to put into words.
Two weeks ago, I sat down with my granddaughter and her father, and we had the antisemitism talk. As conversations tend to meander, ours touched on my idealism. My granddaughter knows who I am. She knows it is my intent to fight back, and she is worried that I may end up hurt, or even dead. I looked at her and said, “I have no intention of dying. I plan to do everything I can to stay alive. But if it comes down to that, Bubbelah, if I’m killed, it’s okay. It’s okay. There are some things worth dying for.”
Now, compare that to a YouTube video I watched yesterday of an informal interview with a Hezbollah terrorist. The most chilling thing about that interview was not that he wanted me (and all Jews) dead, although, yeah, that was hard to handle. The most chilling thing was that he believed his mission was worth dying for.
“Every time an INFJ is born, the gods flip a coin, and the world holds its breath.”
