The Lack of Self-Deception

Many lot of human emotions are when judging a situation, based on their assessment of mindset of the villain. But using that as a yardstick will leave society worse off. It is an instinct that does not scale to 8 billion humans. Doesn&#x27;t even scale to the 10s of millions of humans.<p>If brutal honesty is not tolerated then people will just lie more. If Hitler had believed that this speech mattered (and he was probably correct that it did not) then he would have just said something different and had the same actions carried out.<p>The real problem is the people who, in public, only accept exactly what people claim verbally and either unwilling or unable to look at the incentives in play. We&#x27;ve had people just as bad mindset as Hitler in government - probably even in the major democracies. There isn&#x27;t really an argument otherwise, we know the system favours amoral narcissistic sociopaths in high office. The checks on power and better incentives in a democracy matter far more than honesty or lies.

The article assumes the ends never justify the means, and it seems to me fairly naive to have that position. Of course the means will justify the ends, if the ends are important enough. A police who shoots a knife wielding attacker in the leg is clearly a means that justify the ends for example. The only difference between that and Hitler is 1) the scale and 2) that Hitler was factually wrong about the universe.<p>Villains are heroes of their own story. This is something we must take to heart if we are ever to learn anything useful from history.