I just finished a book about Dr. Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist who is featured in the film Nuremberg (played by the excellent Rami Malek). He was assigned to evaluate the captured Nazi leaders while they were awaiting trial and execution. He used tactics like psychological tests, including Rorschach inkblots, to evaluate why these men had committed such evil acts. The world wanted to know what made these men different from the rest of us, the “good people.” They wanted to know that there was something wrong with them that caused them to behave in such cruel and callous ways. They wanted to know how monsters are created.

Another person who evaluated Nazi leaders was Hannah Arendt, the political theorist and philosopher. She covered the Eichmann trial in 1961 and focused on the nature of evil and how totalitarianism happened in society. Eichmann personally oversaw the deportation and murder of 440,000 Hungarian Jews, traveling to Budapest and sending them to Auschwitz for extermination. He also devised the logistics of the Holocaust, the “Final Solution,” to speed up the murder process and eliminate the Jewish race entirely. He also oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of Roma and deportion of Slovenian and Polish citizens to concentration camps. He was found guilty and executed for his war crimes by an Israeli court in 1962; he claimed he was a “small cog in the machinery,” but they found him to be a zealous and ideological participant in the genocide. Arendt’s most controversial claim was that Eichmann was not a monster or sadist–he was terrifyingly ordinary.

Her analysis showed how evil is committed by:

  • mediocre bureaucrats
  • careerists
  • conformists
  • people who stop thinking critically

In her view, Eichmann was not particularly ideological. He was thoughtless. He spoke in cliches and displayed no brilliance or insight. He considered himself a loyal functionary. She found that he lacked moral imagination. Her work showed that modern systems enable mass crime, like the Holocaust, through paperwork and procedure. Division of labor allows individuals to avoid moral responsibility (hence Eichmann’s “just a cog” defense). Obedience replaces judgment. Evil becomes normalized within a system.

One way this occurs is explored in the 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg. This depicts the trials, not of the top Nazi leaders, but of the judges they appointed to administer their unjust laws. In the trial, a judge talks about performing his role to administer the law, not about the broader goals behind the new laws that were designed to imprison and deport Jews who had lived in Germany for hundreds of years. This illustrates Arendt’s point, that an individual in an unjust system can keep their head down and perform their small role by avoiding the troubling idea of what they are doing.

In the book, the Nazi and the Psychiatrist (I read that one which is about the doctor, although Dr. Kelley also wrote his own book 22 Cells in Nuremberg), Dr. Kelley also showed that the Nazi leaders were not insane or psychotic. They were psychologically stable and many of them scored high on intelligence tests. He particuarly found that Goering was highly intelligent, charismatic, and narcissistic. He found the following traits through his analysis:

  • narcissism
  • grandiosity
  • moral disengagement
  • lack of empathy
  • rationalization
  • authoritarian personality traits

Like Arendt, he was disturbed by how normal they were. If he didn’t know what they had done, he would not have flagged them as dangerous based on their psychology. He did note their moral flexibility:

  • They justified their actions as a patriotic duty
  • They reframed atrocities as necessary policy
  • They avoided personal responsibility

He saw ideology and ego as their primary psychological drivers. This was particularly true for Goering. Dr. Kelley’s work was not very welcome in the direct aftermath of WW2. People wanted to believe, they needed to be able to believe, that these atrocities were committed by people who were nothing like them, whose leaders were insane monsters, not that ordinary people could commit such crimes.

When I toured Dachau concentration camp (even more than Auschwitz which was larger and further from the town), I was struck by the fact that two story houses in Dachau had a clear line of sight into the concentration camp. They dressed their children in Sunday best and walked to church while ash from the crematoria fell through the air like snowflakes. That’s the banality of evil Arendt described. When it is normalized, you can believe the comforting lies that you are being fed through state propaganda. It’s easier to stop thinking too much because thinking puts you in danger. Instead, you can focus on the role you play in life, with your head down.

Kelley focused on understanding how narcissistic leaders could excuse their actions through moral flexibility, and Arendt showed how the rest of society allowed them to accomplish their evil goals:

  • Civil servants who complied
  • Lawyers who reinterpreted rules
  • Legislators who looked away
  • Media figures who rationalized

She also noted that authoritarian drift happens when:

  • Professionals prioritize loyalty over legality and justice
  • Careerism overrides conscience
  • Voters shrug and say “This is just how politics works.”

Kelley’s focus was on the leaders themselves, not on the bureaucrats. He saw that their aims were driven by their own narcissism, sensitivity to slights, desire for loyalty over competence, polarizing rhetoric, moral rationalization, and eventually increasing paranoia, but they would not succeed without the enablers identified by Arendt’s analysis. The pyschology behind the enablers fits into five different human tendencies:

  • Careerism. “I can do more good inside than outside.”
  • Normalization. “This is unusual, but not illegal.”
  • Tribal loyalty. “Our side must win because the other side is much worse.”
  • Fear of chaos. “Stability matters more than norms.”
  • Diffusion of responsibility. “I’m just one person. I can’t make a difference.”

All of these psychological factors are common to humanity. Choosing to set them aside requires thoughtfulness and deliberate choice. It’s important to recognize that not every authoritarian leader equals Hitler (or Ceaucescu or Orban or Putin), and not all populism is fascism. Not every broken norm equals dictatorship. Not every authoritarian regime commits genocide, although they are certainly not celebrated for their human rights expansion.

There are some questions that we need to consider:

  • Are truth norms eroding?
  • Are institutions becoming loyalty-based?
  • Are elites rationalizing what they would once reject?
  • Is dissent increasingly framed as treason?

There are many of these qualities (of leaders and enablers) that we can see in the LDS church, which is full of human beings after all. Considering these last four questions, I’m not sure how to answer them as concerns the church because it seems to me that these authoritarian tendencies have been there at least my entire lifetime.

You could go back to Joseph Smith’s day and ask if truth norms were eroding when polygamy was happening in secret–yes, definitely. Has the institution become loyalty-based? Joseph Smith created a cult of personality with himself at the top, and many were excommunicated for criticizing him personally, such as in the Kirtland bank failure. Nelson’s self-reference in General Conference certainly reminded me of Trump naming buildings after himself while in office. Were elites rationalizing what they would once reject? Well, again, going back to the polygamy example, the BOM specifically calls it an abomination, and then ten years after its publication it was a secret privilege for the elites to participate in. Is dissent framed as treason? That feels like a repeat of the second question, but the answer as Joseph Smith got closer to the end of his life is pretty much . . . yes. He used the Danites as his own personal bodyguard force in Nauvoo. They took loyalty oaths, enforced church discipline, and intimidated dissenters with violence. In his defense, Joseph was also in mortal peril at times. As they say, even if you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Joseph Smith ran both the religious and political life of the church. Nauvoo operated under a theocratic political structure with him at the helm. Many would say Utah still operates this way. Is the conflation of political and religious power and authority something that has always been a part of the church? Is that why these authoritarian tendencies feel so familiar?

Regarding the enabler mindest, I couldn’t help but think of the SEC scandal, and the two employees who would not sign false statements who were immediately fired and replace with compliant individuals. I don’t know if that’s a new rationalization or business as usual, but it does mean that following your conscience (and the law) was not valued, but doing what you are told was.

I also wondered about the concept of loyalty oaths, something that has become relevant as during Trump’s second term, anyone who denied that he “won” the 2020 election was considered insufficiently loyal. Temple recommend interviews, which active Mormons undergo every two years if they want to remain in good standing in the community, include affirming that they sustain the current leaders as “prophets, seers, and revelators.” This language was not a part of the temple recommend questions until the mid-20th century, requiring members to agree that the apostles (and not just the President) hold those roles. It’s hard to see that as anything but a loyalty oath. Now, I realize that people get around that by telling themselves that sustain means my own conscience is still respected in the process, but that feels like a personal justification. Try disagreeing openly with an apostle at church, and see how that goes. I think we’ve got a loyalty oath.

  • How does the modern LDS church hold up under these questions? Is it changing or the same as always?
  • Do you see the LDS church functioning as a theocratical political entity today? If so, in what ways?
  • Do you find yourself feeling these psychological dynamics when you are involved in the church?

Discuss.