Adolf Hitler: A Political Archetype of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Edited version of an article from 2016.
Where textbook examples of propaganda, demagoguery and totalitarianism is concerned, Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, author of the blueprint for genocide Mein Kampf, and initator of the Second World War is practically archetypal. So glaring is his example that the Reductio ad Hitlerum demands we must often look for better examples in political debate to compare to lest we be justly accused of reaching for low-hanging fruit.
This fact nothwithstanding, Hitler and the movement he created remain archetypal examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. What is the Dunning-Kruger effect you ask? Wikipedia defines it as follows:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of those of low ability to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their ability accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.
Dunning and Kruger have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in those of low ability, and external misperception in those of high ability: “The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”
From the point of view of Dunning-Kruger, Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf is particularly telling in terms of his total lack of insight into his own limitations, and his tendency to blame the dirty Jews and the Marxists when his own life goes pear-shaped. Hitler’s recounting of his schooling describes his propensity to argue with adults despite not having yet received his education, and yet, to his account, this has absolutely no bearing on his life outcomes.
‘I think that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades,’ he reflects in Chapter 1. ‘ I had become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather difficult to manage.’ Anyone who teaches for a living will tell you that rowdy students don’t tend to learn well and easily, ‘juvenile ringleaders’ leae of all; if anything they are the kids who are having trouble learning and try to disrupt everyone else in order to assuage their own anxiety.
Hitler’s commentary on his arguments with his father are also telling, as he notes that ‘the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead him to appreciate his son’s oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I had in my head at that time.’ Unmissable here is the assumption that Hitler Snr. should have been able to understand the ‘boyish’ ideas Hitler had in his head; we are the only ones reading ‘boyish’ as ‘juvenile.’ When Hitler writes ‘boyish,’ what he clearly means is, ‘when I was a boy.’ Clearly Hitler must have been a prodigy for his father not to have been able to make head nor tail of what his son was talking about. I myself was a prodigy around closing time at the pub the other night; I had to do a load of washing after I prodigied everywhere in my prodigy stupor.
Even though his father couldn’t understand him, Hitler recounts, or perhaps because of it, ‘It was decided that I should study.
Considering my character as a whole, and especially my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the Realschule 2) would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian Gymnasium.
A moment ago Hitler was telling us that his father didn’t understand him and his talents; now he tells us that his father does understand him very well, and recognises his drawing talent, and sent him off to technical school to draw, because his temperament precluded him from being able to grapple with the kinds of complex ideas that lead into tertiary study. Someone from continuity really needed to take Rudolf Hess aside and give him a good talking to. Reading between the lines it sounds like Hitler Snr. understood his son all too well, if not that Hitler developed an inferiority complex where classical subjects were as well.
Many, many pages later but still within the same chapter, Hitler discusses the evolution of his political convictions — specifically, that ‘there arose in me a feeling of intense love for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred for the Austrian State.’ He wrote,
That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my study of history at school never left me afterwards. World history became more and more an inexhaustible source for the understanding of contemporary historical events, which means politics. Therefore I will not “learn” politics but let politics teach me.
We can gather some idea of what a great student of history Hitler was by how reflecting on successfully and completely he repeated it. What is clear here is the haughty belief in his own capabilities, which in the text of Mein Kampf are asserted again and again and again with mind-numbing monotony — as if he was trying to convince himself through sheer repetition. Any humility resulting from the kind of competency that recognises similar competencies in others is conspicuous by its absence. If Hitler can’t communicate with others, it’s because they’re stupid. If they don’t enable him, they’re stupid. If they make a decision that he has to abide by, he came up with it himself and makes a virtue of necessity. It’s almost as though he’s a very stable genius.
Being a consistent as well as a very stable genius, Hitler maintained his habit arguing with his father by digging his heels in over the kind of career he should choose — his father wanting him to become a civil servant and him wanting to become a painter. ‘I went a step further and declared that I would not study anything else,’ he recalled.
With such declarations the situation became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence, but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that I was making no progress at the Realschule, for weal or for woe, he would be forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of . . . I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me, especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter. What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’. In another it read ‘average’ or even ‘below average’. By far my best subjects were geography and, even more general history. These were my two favourite subjects, and I led the class in them . . . When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind. First, I became a nationalist . . . Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.
Hitler then, in his own humble admission, was a raging success at school, except when he legit flunked totes on purpose (as a righteous expression of passive aggression), and once again a legit exceptional student of history (how does he do it). Despite this, he found yet that ‘The curriculum and teaching methods followed in the middle school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly indifferent.’ He does not elaborate on whether this was because they involved facts, empiricism or causality, or because they were hostile to teleology and acute paranoia. Happily, however, ‘Illness suddenly came to my assistance.
Within a few weeks it decided my future and put an end to the long- standing family conflict. My lungs became so seriously affected that the doctor advised my mother very strongly not under any circumstances to allow me to take up a career which would necessitate working in an office. He ordered that I should give up attendance at the Realschule for a year at least. What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently fought for, now became a reality almost at one stroke.
Once again everything works out more or less exactly as intended, amazing! Hitler’s prodigiousness knows no bounds, apart from arguing incessantly with everyone, failing a bunch of subjects in school and then dropping out of school. Skipping forward a lot of pages again, all filled with Hitler’s favourite topic of discussion (no prizes for guessing what that is) to chapter 2. Here we find Hitler in Vienna, trying to get into art school.
And now I was here for the second time in this beautiful city, impatiently waiting to hear the result of the entrance examination but proudly confident that I had got through. I was so convinced of my success that when the news that I had failed to pass was brought to me it struck me like a bolt from the skies. Yet the fact was that I had failed . . When I left the Hansen Palace, on the Schiller Platz, I was quite crestfallen. I felt out of sorts with myself for the first time in my young life. For what I had heard about my capabilities now appeared to me as a lightning flash which clearly revealed a dualism under which I had been suffering for a long time, but hitherto I could give no clear account whatsoever of the why and wherefore.
Here Hitler sees absolutely zero reasons to reflect on his operating assumptions in being proudly confident of sailing in, and then totally bombing out. There is not one comment of the order of, ‘hey maybe I shouldn’t have backanswered my teachers,’ or ‘maybe I shouldn’t have tried to sabotage the opportunity my old man was giving me in suggesting to go to art school to draw, which I made a point of talking about actively sabotaging because I clearly had my attitude up my arse.’ Only now does Hitler even begin to suspect there is anything wrong with the ‘dualism’ between his rampaging narcissism and his patent lack of competency—perhaps the result of his admission, by his own recount, of ever being able to be told anything.
Having been encouraged to try architecture apparently as a softener to the profound blow to his own illusory superiority, Hitler decided to become an architect.
But of course the way was very difficult. I was now forced bitterly to rue my former conduct in neglecting and despising certain subjects at the Realschule. Before taking up the courses at the School of Architecture in the Academy it was necessary to attend the Technical Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this school was a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School. And this I simply did not have. According to the human measure of things my dream of following an artistic calling seemed beyond the limits of possibility.
From Hitler’s own admission, he managed to sabotage his own prospects by arguing with his father the same way he argued with his teachers who didn’t buy into his nationalism, both of whom were trying to help him. He refused to study subjects at at school such that he failed them before relishing in the opportunity to leave school behind permanently and do what he had fought tooth and nail with his father to do, before failing at. At no point does any of this figure in his reflections, which never happen. Nevertheless, the next thing that comes from him is this:
It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.
In other words, it’s the Marxists and Jews who are making life shitty for everyone, not the poor judgement we display or our own lack of insight into its consequences. Having just admitted he cause all his problems, Hitler buries the implications completely and rushes headlong into an antisemitic diatribe that ended with the Nazi death camps. His idea of reflection on the problems he creates for himself is to write:
I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and enabled me to be as tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother’s darling was taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to fight.
Presumably in talking about toughness Hitler is referring to the long tantrum he has just been describing through the first few (very long) chapters of Mein Kampf. Presumably he means blaming his own poor choices and the clear personality disorders he could not—and then would not—do anything to address.
Nevertheless, the evolution of this story does beg the question as to how Hitler was still able to garner so much support. Wilhelm Reich, a former student of Freud’s in Germany and a practicing psychoanalyst in Austria, argued in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that moralistic repression of all the personal drives towards individual assertion and self-fulfillment, be they physical or existential, diverted such energies instead into service of the totalitarian state. For the loyal subject of the Nazi state, Reich argued, the stereotype of the Jew provided a suitable scapegoat for its destruction of their individuality, and war a suitable outlet for otherwise frustrated energies (cue L7’s Wargasm). Perhaps Hitler was tapping into a reservior of Dunning-Krugerism latent within us all.
With these aspects of Nazi social engineering taken care of and the bread and circuses arranged to keep the peasants from revolting, Reich argued, Hitler was able to bring the entire nation of Germany behind a militaristic project that resulted comprehensively in its destruction. There can be no question that Hitler was driven to unusual lengths to avoid acknowledging the reasons why he failed to become an architect. From the passages of Mein Kampf that follow, it would seem that he was at least able to innovate in pushing the envelope where acting out was concerned.
In any event, most relevant for us today was Reich’s observation that the dynamics driving the Nazi war machine were anything but limited to Germany in the 1930s. They were, on the contrary, a dangerously acute example of psychological and emotional tendencies far more pervasive in individual human subjectivity. There was, in other words, a little bit of Hitler in all of us — various attempts to portray the Nazi leader as somehow something other than human, as opposed to someone who was in reality all too human, notwithstanding. Again the dynamics of Dunning Krugerism seem instructive, if not those of capture-bonding, authoritarian psychology, intergenerational trauma and psychohistory.
Another German, Erich Fromm, reached similar conclusions. Fromm, who was a student of Jung, took a less mechanistic approach to authoritarian psychology. He argued in books such as The Fear of Freedom that the power of totalitarian regimes in particular derived at least as much from the inculcation and development of a relationship of emotional attachment to and dependence on authority as from the repression of personal physical drives. Many people, Fromm found, had essentially the same kind of relationship with the state and with religious hierarchies that they had with codependent romantic partners. If there is any instance in which confidence and competency part ways in earnest, toxic and abusive relationships would certainly appear to be up there.
Not only were these kinds of codependent political relationships ruinous of happiness, wellbeing and the capacity of people to function effectively as individuals, Fromm argued, but they were also destructive of their ability to function outside of them; thus the longer and more inured people became to them, the harder it was for them to leave.
Rather than being strong, healthy and vibrant individuals capable of standing on their own two feet, they became repressed, dogmatic, rigid and inflexible, fearful of their own shadow even before they got to the newsstand, and paralyzed by terror in the face of real freedom. For adherents to institutionalized religion who had reified their ideologically driven codependency into an imaginary paternal figure, such freedom was tantamount to rejection or abandonment, and no less painful a prospect. Again this begs the question as to degress of competency in professing special insight into history and the conditions of Germans in the interwar period of the 1920s and 30s.
All of this supported Reich’s arguments commentary insofar as the National Socialist movement provided a safe haven for budding Dunner-Krugerites who could entertain their cognitive biases and delusions of grandeur about their illusory superiority on the basis of things they had no control over (like the colour of their skin and ethnic heritage).
As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote,
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
For the self-proclaimed king of the übermenschen, nothing about Hitler ever once gave the impression he was internally resolved and self-contained. Managing to conquer the German state with nazi ideology and then most of Europe for a few years did nothing to address or solve the problems he discusses earlier in the book, nothing to address his status anxiety. One gets the suspicion that, even if he had won the war and wiped out every Jew and communist in Europe, Hitler would have still needed deviant figures to hate on to avoid having to address his own shortcomings, his own lack of personal resolution. It is almost as though that’s why the Nazis came up with that idea of the Eternal Jew, i.e. as a pretext for permanent avoidance of self.
This is not the thinking or action of someone who has a balanced and measured sense of their own competency. The supreme confidence of the genocidal demagogue instead speaks to very deep-seated underlying insecurities, if not the incapacity to take instruction and develop competency by recognising and acknowledging it in others. At no point does Hitler do this. At no point do we get any sense that Hitler has ever taken instruction from anyone—in particular, where his grandiose claims to great insight into history are concerned. His antics are the stuff of confidence trickery, the capacity to fool those willing to believe what they’re told without ever reading between the lines, assessing consistency between claims and actions.
Instead of trying to do anything constructive about the problems he voices, and in so doing demonstrate any of the competency he seem to claim until he’s blue in the fact, Hitler acts out on them ways that gets people hurt and himself eventually inserted into the history books as one of its villains. It is almost as though Hitler and and his Dunning-Krugerite minions would have been better off addressing their own insecurities and negative feelings themselves, instead of acting out ideologically and throwing a national tantrum all the way up to World War and the Holocaust. This has been a particularly valuable lesson in the aftermath of the US Presidential elections, where the very stable genius who took the reigns for 4 terrible years reflected much the same mentality, turning politics into even more of a spectable of confidence grifting than ever. Same as before, however, the competency behind it was conspicuously lacking.
