Goering Loved His Children, and Always Assume You Are Wrong Or You'll Be Noah Smith
Some rambling today, as, weirdly, an interview for a movie and a story about Noah Smith being a twit have crystalized something for me. We suffer under the lash of people who simply do not like other human beings. Not profound, probably, and likely just as un-original as it is bland, but the ways in which it manifests are interesting to me.
I always assume that when I have a problem at work that I am the person responsible for the error. Now, I am pretty good at my job so I am often not responsible for the error. But neither am I perfect — sometimes I misunderstand something, sometimes I make a mistake, sometimes I have bad or outdated information. But the process of checking my stuff first almost inevitably leads to either the real problem or enough information to help others find the real problem. And, occasionally, I learn something about how I am doing something wrong or less than optimally. Those are all valuable results, but they start with the assumption that I am not perfect. That assumption keeps me from being, well, Noah Smith.
Noah smith is a writer and economist, someone smart people constantly tell me is smart and worth listening to. Unfortunately for Noah Smith, social media exists and he seems incapable of resisting its siren’s song. Recently, he posted about how the UK is a failing nation because he got lost at Heathrow. No, seriously. He didn’t red the signs, got a bit of bad advice, and ended up having to re-go through security in order to make his connection. Okay, amusing story, haha, maybe learned a few things. No, not our Noah.
When his mistakes were pointed out to him, he double downed. Of course the problem was not him. he was perfect in every way. The problem obviously was Heathrow and the collapsing UK state. People who were pointing out where he went wrong and how he could avoid the issue in the future? Those weren’t normal, helpful people — those were apologists for the failure of British society. They were not interested in fixing the problem, only in making excuses and spinning insults. You see, Noah Smith is a Smart Boy, and therefor he could not have been wrong. That is inconceivable. No, all the other people must be wrong.
Herman Goering loved his kids. For those of you who do not know, Goering was a top leader in the Nazis, a monster under every definition of the word. But a movie based on a book about interviews with him drives home the point — he was also a normal person who loved his family and loved his country. The problem was how he defined his family and his country. For those outside his immediate circle, death and torture were the rule of the day. Perfectly pleasant people can and have been monsters.
Okay, again nothing revelatory here. What’s the point?
The point, I think, is that Noah Smith and Herman Goering share some characteristics. Smith, obviously, is not the monster Goering was, not even close. But he might the kind of person who can turn into a monster. Why? Because he seems to exhibit the same propensity to not think of other human beings as human beings. Noah Smith reacted the way he did for a lot of reasons, I suspect. He places a lot of value on being smarter than almost everyone else, and his ego probably took a severe hit when he was publicly shown to have done something stupid. But part of that “smarter than everyone else” seems to come with a contempt for the opinions of everyone not him and not in his immediate circle. His writing is often contemptuous to people he supposedly is on the same side with, but this incident seems to me to demonstrate how that belief manifest.
Smith just does not seem capable of understanding that other people might know things he does not. No sane person would yell at people and accuse them of acting in bad faith for correcting his mistakes about how an airport works. Smith is no more an expert on Heathrow than I am on the mating habits of Peruvian snails (or, for that matter, am an expert on whether or not Peruvian snails do, in fact, exist). But Smith is absolutely certain he is correct and his critics wrong, in large part, I think, because he cannot imagine those critics as real people. He cannot see them as people, people who have experience, knowledge, and wisdom that he should respect. They are mere tools in his never-ending quest to prove himself the Smartest of the Smart Boys. And that way leads to monsters.
Goering helped create the Holocaust, and all the other horrors of Nazism, not because he was a uniquely terrible person. Rather it was because he didn’t see people outside his circle as fully human. Yes, he loved his children and his family. Yes he loved his country. But he could never see that the people on the other side of that line were people too, deserving of the same consideration as his family and the people he considered his countrymen. And so he became a monster to them. Now, I am obviously not saying the Smith is on the path to becoming Goering. But he does have the same root problem — he appears to see people as things rather than people. And it, unfortunately, a problem a lot of leadership seems to have.
Elon Musk claims that empathy is the greatest weakness of the West. He once called a rescue expert a pedophile because the man had the temerity to correct Musk’s unworkable idea for saving a group of trapped kids. No one who sees other people as people, who thinks about other people as beings worthy of concern and consideration, would do something like that. And yet, we have the VP of the United States agreeing that empathy is a flaw, arguing that we effectively owe compassion and decency only to the people closest to us (and speaking a someone born and raised Catholic, I would appreciate it if all you johnny come lately converts would spend several years reading about Mother Jones and Liberation Theology and the doctrine of fucking works before you try and tell the rest of us what is and is not good Catholic practice. Thanks.), and leaders of the Christian Right calling empathy a sin. It is the kind of hollowing out of shared responsibility to out fellow people that leads to the kind of society that can kill the “other” without remorse.
A brief aside about the idea that empathy is bad. It is not. It does not mean you cannot jail people, or judge people, or must feel the same for everyone. That is transparent nonsense designed to get people to abandoned the most human of feelings. Empathy means that you treat people as people, not tools, not things, even the bad people. Because by doing so, even for the worst of us, you guarentee that everyone has the best chance of being treated as they should. And that you, yourself, don’t find yourself on the wrong side of someone’s line between worthy and not.
The thing that monsters like Hitler and Stalin and the people who gave Native Americans blankets infected with disease all share is this inability to see others beyond their own little social circle as fully human. Being nice to your family and friends does not impress me. That is the basic price of being a human being, the table stakes, the entry fee. What makes you truly human is your ability to extend that fellow feeling to humans beings as a whole, to people you expect nothing from.
So this has been long and ramble-y. And I am not trying to say that Smith is going to go full Nazi anytime soon. But I am saying that he shows the signs of someone who does not care about people as people, but only in so far as they are useful to him. And that attitude has historically lead to some very bad places. I would suggest, then, that when you encounter people who consistently treat people as things rather than people that you take a closer look. I suspect you’ll see at least a little bit of monster in them.