This post highlights the dangers, albeit extreme, from a society that does not think critically. And believe me, the dumbing down of society is just getting started. AI will upend our thinking.
My first year at university was spent studying for a Bachelors in Law. I realized law was not a profession I wanted to pursue when I attended a Crown Court murder case, perpetrated by two teenagers, one of whom, according to his defense, was “under duress”, from the stronger teenager, which meant he was coerced into committing the murder against his will or ‘better’ judgement. It was a horrific case and I realized I could not be a criminal lawyer. I changed my subject to a speciality in psychology of business ethics.
Recently, as part of my research of cognitive warfare, I have been reading many books about the stories of people like you and me during the second world war, my real interest is not in Hitler but in humanity. One book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, made me literally sick to the stomach.
What all of the books have in common is how victimhood, blaming the other and sheer manipulation can steer people into despicable, barbaric acts and take away people's ability to think for themselves.
I am particularly concerned about this, not because of any possible rise of a totalitarian state in the West, but because of declining literacy and the ability to think critically.
Hannah Arendt, in her Banality of Evil, argued that the World War II atrocities were not solely the work of monstrous individuals, but rather, were enabled by the actions of ordinary people who failed to think critically about the consequences of their actions. This is by no means an excuse, Arendt's theory challenged traditional notions of evil, suggesting that it is not always radical or demonic but can be a result of thoughtlessness, indifference, and a failure to exercise moral judgment.
Two memoirs in particular, written from the heart of that darkness, offer a timeless and terrifying answer to how this happens: Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler and Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free.
If you want to know how democracy dies, don’t watch the tyrant. Watch your neighbor. Or better yet, watch yourself the moment you stop asking questions and start nodding along. In Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner wrote as an ordinary man caught in the slow erosion of everything that mattered. His memoir, despite its title, begins not with Hitler, not with a rousing speech or a climactic battle, but with a duel: one private individual, face-to-face with a state demanding his thoughts, his gestures, his time, his soul. It is not a battle of equals. The outcome seems inevitable. Yet Haffner offers us a disturbing truth: the erosion of freedom does not come by force alone. It comes by consent, by inertia, by a quiet willingness to go along.
Milton Mayer, writing decades later in They Thought They Were Free, offers the other side of the equation: not the duel, but the surrender. His ten Nazi friends were not monsters. They were bakers, teachers, clerks. They were not hardened thugs. They paid taxes. They walked dogs. They helped neighbors. And they followed.
Many described themselves as “wir kleine Leute”, we little people, ‘grateful’ to a regime that gave them holidays, security, and the dignity of economic stability. One fondly recalled the ten-mark trips through the Strength Through Joy program. Another emphasized the disappearance of the “higgle and haggling of the parties.” The seduction was not ideological but practical. The trains ran. The meals came. The compromises began.
Caveat Emptor
Together, these two books form a harrowing diptych of modernity: how free individuals capitulate, and how ordinary decency becomes a smokescreen for extraordinary evil.
Haffner’s early chapters are deceptively charming, almost bucolic. He recalls with precise, painful nostalgia the forests of Pomerania, the ‘thrill’ of childhood war games, the thrum of patriotic fervor in 1914. And then, without transition, he shows us how this very fervor would later become the precondition for fascism:
“From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game... that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.”
What appears to be an innocent rite of passage is, in hindsight, a national grooming.
This is the first warning: propaganda is not merely the lies told by the powerful. It is also the games children play, the songs they sing, the silences adults maintain. The insidiousness lies in its pleasure. The boys of 1914 found the war exciting before they found it appalling. By the time they saw the latter, they had already lost the ability to dissent.
Haffner reminds us:
“We anonymous others” are not just “pawns in the chess game.” On the contrary, the “most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.”
He insists on the importance of ‘understanding’:
“some very peculiar, very revealing, mental processes and experiences” involving “the private lives, emotions and thoughts of individual Germans.”
Mayer picks up where Haffner leaves off. He does not speak from exile but from immersion: he lived among ten ordinary Germans who had joined the Nazi Party. Their reflections are banal, precise, and devastating. None of them felt responsible. None believed they had chosen evil. They simply failed to choose anything else. One of Mayer's subjects explains the process:
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it... Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted, that... no one could see the overall pattern.”
He likened it to watching crops grow: “One day it is over your head.” By the time they noticed, they had helped build the machine.
This is the second warning: the machinery of authoritarianism does not run on hatred alone. It runs on habit. On custom. On procedural acquiescence. People do not march because they are evil. They march because it is easier than not marching. Because resistance, especially alone, is exhausting.
Congruent
Haffner, ever the reluctant protagonist, never pretends to be a hero. His memoir is less a celebration of resistance than a chronicle of weariness. He does not join the Nazis. But nor does he change history. What he preserves is much bigger: his mind, his sense of judgment, the quiet core of selfhood that refuses to mouth what it does not believe. “He was not born a hero,” Haffner writes of himself, “still less a martyr.” And yet he resisted. Not by attacking the regime, but by refusing its vocabulary.
However, even Haffner falters. In a haunting moment, an SS man confronts him in the library and asks, “Are you Aryan?” He replies reflexively, “Yes.” He writes:
“Before I had a chance to think, I said ‘Yes’... A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat. I had said ‘Yes’!... I had failed my very first test.”
The defeat was not physical. It was internal. The line had been crossed with a single syllable.
This is the third warning: it is enough to keep thinking. Even when everyone else has stopped. But that does not mean one always will, and of course there is self-preservation..
Haffner understood, too, the deeper seductions. He describes the training camp where he was conscripted not as a space of ideological indoctrination but of something more primitive: comradeship. ‘Kameradschaft’. He calls it “a drug, a form of intoxication,” and worse: “a powerful sedative” that obliterates the self.
“It relieves men of responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before God, before their consciences.”
It is more than the crowd, it is a crowd that hugs you while it corrodes you.
What binds these two accounts is their common refusal to demonize. Neither Haffner nor Mayer is interested in explaining Nazism as a pathology. They do not hunt for devils. They trace the banal, deliberate choices of people who once saw themselves as decent. What emerges is a bleakly instructive pattern. The ordinary man will not, as a rule, recognize the crisis while he is inside it. He will rationalize, adapt, submit.
And often, he will find that the institutions meant to protect him, courts, churches, newspapers, have already surrendered. Haffner recounts the moment stormtroopers invaded the Kammergericht, Prussia’s highest court. A man who only months before had embodied the majesty of law now meekly allowed his nose to be inspected for racial purity. Mayer shows how churches, schools, universities, police departments were not taken by force. They offered themselves up.
Conforming
The lesson of Haffner and Mayer is not that Germans were uniquely vulnerable. Quite the opposite. The lesson is that under the right conditions, you might do the same. You might follow orders. You might vote for strength. You might look away.
The question is not: “What would I have done in 1933?” The question is: “What am I doing now?”
We live in a time when conformity can be mistaken for kindness, and silence for wisdom. When to disagree with the crowd is to risk exile. The internet has not solved this; it has simply made the crowd larger and more inescapable. And yet the demand remains the same: to speak the words others are speaking, to feign belief for the sake of harmony, to adopt the approved enthusiasms of the day.
But that is how it begins.
We think fascism arrives with a swastika and a shout. More often it arrives with an apology and a nonchalant shrug. A slight compromise. A lesser evil. A fear of speaking out lest one be misunderstood. In the literature of cognitive warfare, the NATO researchers warn that we must be aware of the enemy within, often supported by our real enemies abroad.
Haffner’s memoir ends not with triumph, but with a kind of tactical retreat: he leaves Germany. His fight, he says, has been transferred to another plane. But the lesson remains. One does not have to win the duel. One has only to show up for it. One has to keep thinking, even when thought has become treason.
“They thought they were free,” Mayer titled his book, and he meant it. But thinking you are free is not the same as being free. The difference lies in what you are willing to question. And how much discomfort you are willing to endure.
Because the crowd is always waiting.
And it is always easier to join it.
Stay curious
Colin
I encourage you to read the Wikipedia article on Strength Through Joy
Note - I personally believe that Germany turned a remarkable corner after the dreadful events of World War II and their constitution and political system has learned the lessons of the evil.
A few of the other books I read as part of this research.
The Scourge of the Swastika, Lord Edward Russell
Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans
The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans
So well said. I fear that what Google Maps did to our sense of direction, AI will do to our capacity for critical thought. We risk becoming, in the words of Erik Hoel, brain-drained “meat puppets.”
More: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/the-inverse-mechanical-turk-meat
Thank you for awareness and the book reviews and recommendations.