Even monsters sleep well

The 7th law of history

Does the end justify the means?

Sometimes, surely. If a newspaper had leaked the D-Day landings ahead of time, few people would have faulted Franklin Roosevelt for denying the reports. His denial would have been a lie. But it would have been a lie in the service of saving many lives.

Open the door to such reasoning, though, and there's no telling where it will lead. Torturing prisoners is rightly condemned. But if waterboarding a captured terrorist might prevent another 9/11-style attack, what intelligence director would say no? If dropping atom bombs on Japanese cities could substantially shorten a brutal war, what American president wouldn't give the order?

Harry Truman wasn't a monster. But he did something many people have deemed monstrous. By his own telling he didn't lose sleep after deciding to use the atom bomb. One might wish he had. Killing 150,000 noncombatants is a horrible thing. But nearly all Americans at the time were glad he gave the order.

How about bigger monsters? Did Hitler lose sleep over his heinous crimes? Did Stalin? Did Mao?

Hitler lost sleep over something. His insomnia was chronic and often debilitating. He took a devil's brew of drugs to get him to sleep.

It would be reassuring to think a troubled conscience was the cause. But there's no evidence for this. If anything, the evidence indicates that Hitler felt as righteous as Truman did. The “master race” he envisioned would rule a world rid of the weakness that had held back humanity for ages. 

The concept strikes us as odious, thank God. So does the strategy of Stalin to build socialism by starving the kulaks. And Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which killed even more people in the name of collective progress.

But be careful when vilifying. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are extreme cases, yet their thinking wouldn't have been unrecognizable to the proponents of the "white man’s burden,” the "mission civilisatrice,” and "manifest destiny”—concepts that underwrote British, French and American imperialism. We must advance humanity, even if lots of humans have to die in the process.

This is not to assert a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and nineteenth-century America, for example. But it is to observe that we humans are remarkably adept at rationalizing our actions. ”So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do," wrote Benjamin Franklin.

The observation is easy to apply to others. It's more importantly applied to ourselves. Most of us admit to occasional mistakes. But we generally think we're doing the right thing. We couldn't live with ourselves if we didn't. We find fault with others much more frequently. 

As a matter of simple arithmetic, this doesn't add up any better than the data from Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average.”

The inescapable conclusion is that we're wrong more often than we think. A clear conscience and sound sleep are no guarantee of righteousness.

Again, there really are monsters in the world. But don't expect them to admit it. Don't expect them even to realize it. While you're sleeping, they are too.

For more on my laws of history: https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-laws-of-history-165