I understand that research needed to look for credible data in order to advance, but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil: regular citizens trying to get their promotion and advance their careers, doing untold damage in the process because they happened to be working during an autocracy. It's nice though that data eventually corroborate what philosophy first observes, even if the observation doesn't necessarily directly prompts an investigation.
Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances
Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.
We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard
I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth.
On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish.
Human behavior is much more complex.
This is a line I see often by people (not you, just to be clear) puzzled because somebody didn't "vote for their own self interest" or at least that is the perception of the person making the statement. I've seen variations of it for at least 30 years. You'd often see it around pressure campaigns to unionize especially.
The shock about the perception is always funny to me, because it reads as shock that someone refused a bribe or was not easily manipulated.
"Stupid people are the most dangerous people" -- Carlos Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs19...
At any given decision point, people are more likely to pick the option that provides some benefit to them. That looks very different from consistently picking the choice that is eventually best for them.
But I do sometimes hold those in contempt who I know have the means to not do evil and choose to anyway.
That is all to say, no it’s not just human nature.
Maybe in a welfare society centered around the community you'd see people naturally acting different.
That's without disputing the naturalization of an observation of state (people act this way so they must always act this way) which I think is also problematic.
From this perspective, the main advantage of technology has been to increase how much a single person can do, leading to more capable small organizations. And this should also make us wonder whether an LLM-heavy org is going to be better or worse aligned than one that has just people and more predictable tech.
There is always some selfishness in people but it is a choice to structure society and economic activity around it.
Survivorship Bias.
Humans that exhibit altruistic behavior get to stay around and make more history. When selfish behavior society collapses and that history is pruned, generally in some horrific event involving a lot of death and genocide.
Now, the mistake you are personally making is thinking you're going to make it because in general humans have stuck around after selfish people fucked everything up.
I agree that many traditional cultures engage in egalitarianism, but genocide and mass-rapes, wars and slavery campaigns, are baked into the anthropological history.
Economic activity, expressed in water and caloric access, is the root of numerous ongoing conflicts (“tribal” and national), and the cause of many historical eradications of competition.
Capitalism seeks to maximize capital, anthropology says life just as brutal as it was before we named and systematized it. Cost benefit doesn’t need dollars as a unit of measure to be effective.
That's why the article actually mentions it.
I gotta mention that Arendt relationship with actual NAZI ideologue Martin Heidegger might have somewhat colored her analysis of evil. I mean, she had a reason to dismiss the importance of ideas, propaganda and prominent intellectuals in creating "evil" regimes when she had a connection to such things (just as she and others covered up how much of an overt NAZI and antisemite Heidegger was, even Hitler took power).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Marburg_(1924%E2...
And naturally this is a controversial take since Arendt and Heidegger have defenders to the present day.
TFA mentions Hannah Arendt in the introduction and discusses the holocaust (if briefly, because most of its focus is on more modern regimes.
This is not to say she got it wrong, I think the banality of evil absolutely holds up in a number of readings of historical events. I just don't think Eichmann was a good example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_trial
> When he took the stand in his own defense, he portrayed himself as a mid-level functionary following orders.[32] He repeatedly claimed he was "merely a little cog in the machinery" of genocide, not a policymaker.
At first, Mr. Scharpf thought the man was just being insulting. He soon realized that the official meant the comment literally — that the military junta’s secret police had been, in his view, incompetent losers.
Let me just cue up Jesse Welles and Join ICE real quick...
Seriously, it’s a good article. Read it. And yes, it explicitly discusses ICE.
https://archive.ph/2026.05.18-091508/https://www.nytimes.com...
Being clever and lazy forces you to determine what should not be done, as opposed to just doing everything because you can because you're clever and industrious.
As you climb higher and higher in decision-making, it becomes clear that the things you say no to at some point becomes more important than the things you say yes to.
Think back to the three virtues of a great programmer: hubris, laziness, and impatience.
Simple example… they get others to do the work while they reap the rewards. That’s clever and lazy.
Guess you didn't come up writing Perl
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/give-a-little-whistle
People being asked for blind loyalty or to step aside.
It is ironic hear people whose whole life was dedicated to chase immigrants being surprise when it evolved to chase each other: police state.
https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru...
https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ord...
Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
An effective, professional workforce is important, but ultimately professionalism and process can only enhance or blunt power.
It's absurd to act like a dataset of Argentinian military promotions is rigorous or valid enough to make any kind of conclusion about how authoritarianism works. This type of "science" is no help in how we all live and work together and our individual experiences are all we really have to help us navigate society.
Really needs some citations to demonstrate researchers believe other factors could be at play.
I wonder if there isn't also a parallel to criminal activity - aren't prisons full of low academic performers/ disadvantaged - who are resorting to crime to 'thrive'.
ie if you set up the game so some people feel they can't win then they will refuse to play.
And so is this a danger of a meritocracy with an insufficient safety net - those you leave behind - will either be angry and resentful and vote in a facist and/or turn to crime?
Look, society for a while now has been incentivizing a “fuck you got mine” attitude in workers at all levels that has fostered immense dysfunction in work, governance, and society itself. We reward exceptional individualism and punish any sort of community action that doesn’t do the same.
This is why mediocre actors will enable and support authoritarian goals: it gets them ahead, society rewards them for it, and they (naively) believe their rewards will somehow protect them from the harms they force unto others. Except that never happens, and eventually when society course-corrects those very same enablers find themselves ostracized from both society at large and the remnants of power that remain; everyone expects to accelerate upward forever, forgetting the roller coaster has to return to the station at some point.
I consider myself both a worker (in that I don’t see myself ever stop working, even if given the resources to do so) and a more-selfless-than-most individual, and I’m quite sick and tired of getting used up and tossed aside by these mediocre miscreants to preserve personal power. The net result of a career of soldiering through bankruptcies, layoffs, downturns, redundancies, mergers, contract changes, and downsizing while mediocre power brokers above ride off into the sunset flush with cash and homes (plural) and wealth has consistently pushed me harder and harder to the left over time. It never matters how many millions I save in costs, or how many hours I work, or how many months of build time I reduce, or how many roles I juggle or councils I sit on, because I’ve never truly been rewarded proportionate to the cost I’ve paid, let alone merely kept around longer than milquetoast leadership or layabout colleagues - and that’s a very strong lesson to try and overturn when it’s been beaten into you for twenty-odd years.
I also know I’m far from alone in this perspective. There’s a growing throng of us who did everything asked of us and then some only to get tossed aside in the name of someone else’s personal wealth or success, and we’re increasingly bitter about it. To limit this only to authoritarianism is missing the forest fire for a single burnt tree.
I agree that extreme individualization in the last few decades has resulted in some really bad actions. We're starting to see Western societal decline because of this, whereas collectivist cultures are thriving. It takes tremendous emotional labor to care for the well being of your community, so it's easier to just worry about only yourself. This is unsustainable just like you mentioned that enablers of authoritarians are never protected. Leaning right and being selfish will eventually hurt that person. It may not hurt them now, or tomorrow, or until 1-2 generations from now, but that course will be corrected. They are prioritizing short term gains over long term benefits, and the good part about this is that a lot of smart hard working people are choosing the long term.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK
On another note: I wanted to shared something about the word "mediocre". I once made a comment to a coworker and friend that we are all just average mediocre people doing mediocre things at work and that is OK. During this same time, another coworker called me a superstar for solving his problem.
The original coworker I had made the mediocre comment to was so offended that they went home, designed a T-shirt and wore it work "Mediocre man. Because not everyone can be a superstar". I saw it. I felt bad and commented to him that I did not mean to call him mediocre or offend him, but the damage was already done. At this same time, I kept getting called superstar by everyone on the team, including by the manager of our team (in retrospect, yikes!). We had a (toxic) culture of nicknames, and this too was going to stick for a while.
At some point, the coworker who made the t-shirt had raised concerns with the manager and eventually the manager pulled us all aside and said "no more superstar, it ends today, we're done with that nickname". Ok, cool.
However, in subsequent conversations, the tshirt coworker would share some of his views of the world with me. He had a very difficult life growing up, so one of his takes was "why do black people get to say black lives matter, but why can't I say white lives matter, my life is difficult too, do I not matter?". I was shocked, but also unsurprised by this. I work in tech, and these kinds of takes are widely prevalent. I don't remember how I tried explaining to them, but I walked away disappointed that they had taken all of the injustice and difficulty of life and instead decided to take something away from a group of people who faced the same :(
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37491/is-it-truly-il...
Maybe with AI? In the future?
(1) "Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust", Richard Rhodes, 2002.
"Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These 'special task forces,' organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943."
(2) "Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich", Richard J. Evans, 2024.
"Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?"
I guess I'm a victim of The Cold Equations story, but almost by definition firm bureaucratic rules are sociopathic. This isn't inherently "bad", but mediocre people deriving all their worth by following a bad bureaucracy have capacity for nearly-infinite evil by being able to launder all the negative feelings through the bureaucracy itself.
At some level I'm no better; I'm typing this message on a computer almost certainly made from parts sourced from questionable labor practices. I would like to think that at least when I'm involved semi-directly I have capacity for empathy and wouldn't just blame a bureaucratic nightmare for the bad things I do, but of course pretty much everyone thinks they're a good person.
Shows up for immoral industries such as gambling and smoking too.
In Nightcrawler, some characters are trying to get ahead, and others are desperate not to fall behind, but their opportunism (driven by the necessity to make money in order to survive in our capitalist society) makes all of them vulnerable to exploitation by an ambitious psychopath. In that case, he is profit-motivated, whereas the article here is about dictators retaining power, but the same principles apply. The movie does an amazing job of exploring how these individuals can wield power irresponsibly, poison everyone who gives them an inch, and sound almost reasonable while they do it. It is a masterful portrayal of how much some people can be willing to compromise on their morals for their job.
If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. If you have seen it, but don't remember it being deeply critical of capitalist society, you should re-watch it. (It's easy to get so engrossed by the truly suspenseful and thrilling moment-to-moment action that you miss the big picture.) The deterioration of American news media is a more overt theme in the movie, but in my opinion, that serves as a complementary backdrop to the anticapitalist message, which is the engine that drives the movie inexorably onward. Also the acting, directing, and writing are great.
Don't spoil it by reading the plot summary, just watch it.
For example, in Italy the judiciary has a governing body of its own whose members are partially elected by the parliament, but also partially by the judges themselves. Lower judges are exclusively appointed by the judiciary governing body or through a civil service exam, and neither the government nor the parliament have any say on it.
At least in America, HR has a reputation for claiming that they are here to help employees but actually only prioritizing the desires of the corpos. The common saying is "HR is not your friend".
Unions were the institutions that actually helped employees. It's a shame they had their reputations smeared and many were busted, leaving workers out in the cold. The worst run union probably does more for employees than the best HR department.
That said, in the USA the pendulum has swinged too far the other way so as of now, unions don't have any capacity to be this bad. Unionizing would be a huge improvement for every employee in pretty much every situation.
The Bosses and Owners have the money, the property, the machines, and political connections.
And power/money builds more power/money. And because its a boss vs worker arrangement, the worker's power will invariably get whittled down year by year.
The real solution here isnt socialism or communism. Its Worker Cooperatives. This makes the worker = the boss. And the previous conflict between the 2 go away. And the workers can make better decisions with all the information.
For example, when a dictatorial company announces layoffs, it just happens. But losing people also loses knowledge of the company, which is bad long term. In those cases, a worker cooperative could explain the situation, and make a decision together to temporarily cut wages INSTEAD of laying people off.
The holocaust couldn't have been carried out without the willing participation of mostly mediocre, apolitical carreirists that followed orders without ever questioning them, and for whom, anything is licit if ordered by am hierarchical superior.
This has been known for a while. If you take a look at where most of the stuff in the world has been made back to the late 1980s, it's not in countries in the former Eastern Bloc where people organized to remove authoritarian single-party governments and introduce democratic republics. It's in an authoritarian single-party state.
Companies themselves aren't really democracies, either. Unless you work for a cooperative where employees are the primary shareholders and are given equal voting power over the company's affairs, you're probably working in an authoritarian oligarchy. It would make sense that there is a lot of overlap in how people doing the groundwork are handled in corporate systems and authoritarian regimes.
Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged. However, even the left has sometimes had a habbit of neglecting the career and social concerns of "mediocre white males" in a way that is likely to make them vulnerable to the sort of recruitment that the article describes.
It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.
At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.
My republican operative acquaintances report the same deal on the other side of the isle of course, though usually with more idiots as the right tends to disdain politics and smart people go into business, whereas many more smart people on the left go to politics.
I think this is true of a lot of representatives at both the state and federal level in both the senate and house, in both parties. And it's a huge problem, because it means that the unelected party leadership wields a tremendous amount of power.
IMO the right broadly misses the fact that government can be efficient, and that a robust universal healthcare system can be good for business dynamism by helping small businesses.
The left loves the government too much and always seems to think if we can just government and NGO a bit more, that'll work (generalization). And that businesses are kind of a dirty idea.
This is "yet more evidence" that science likes to collect, there's no new paradigm hidden there.
On your second paragraph, that's because the people you are talking about are anti-democratic themselves. Even the way your phrase is written singles out "mediocre white males" outside of "disadvantaged" despite what the actual conditions those people have in the real world. That's anti-democratic by itself.
This is a distinguishing feature of USA politics, but it isn’t universal. Several right-right parties in Europe tend to be pretty pro-welfare state (they would just prefer that foreigners not have access to it). It’s generally the centre-right, as the party of the country’s largest business interests, who put up the most opposition to such benefits due to the level of taxation required to provide them.
Meanwhile, in China, run by a party that is still regarded as left by several international leftist umbrella groupings, social safety nets are intentionally kept to a minimum: it is a core principle of the CCP’s anthropology that labour is what makes people human, and people should always be compelled towards some kind of work, like it or lump it.
Many EU countries' current obsession with E2EE and age verification is fucked, but we are still (thankfully) a way from the state of the States.
- We don't need to submit a history of our social media accounts before crossing a border
- (Most) of our libraries aren't having to make joint statements about free speech (https://www.orbiscascade.org/free-speech-statement/)
- And regarding free press - https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor...
The most embarrassing example is Hugo Chávez, who took over a country with paramilitary death squads and brought the living standards of the indigenous and lower classes higher than they'd ever been in history, and they accuse him of "crushing" protests that were constant and allowed during his entire rule (even when they resulted in civilians hung from streetlights.) The NYT finds it important to refer to the Colectivos, made up of civilians, as stupid. Evidence that the National Guard was dumb? A single sentence from some anti-Chavista NYU professor.
The only reason they mentioned Argentina is because they had to; it was the actual subject of the paper. The NYT didn't know that Argentina was bad at the time though, because Argentina wasn't a CIA enemy like everyone else mentioned in this article. Democracy dies when upper middle-class people write articles for the NYT supporting Argentina.
edit: it's so evil that this starts with Putin and Iran, for no particular reason, never mentioned again. Then it goes Hitler -> Stalin -> Dirty War -> Orban (?) -> Chávez/Maduro (?) -> Trump.
Pretty sure that Hitler murdered like 40 million people, Stalin liquidated millions, the Dirty War disappeared tens of thousands. Meanwhile, Orban is simply someone that they don't like, Maduro they claim killed "dozens," and they support Trump's wars and genocide (Putin! Iran!), they're actually pretending to be upset about ICE.
By the smallest margin since 1968 (one of the smallest in history) with the aid of a rough economy he helped create but got no blame for and a terribly mismanaged Democratic primary/election.
He also would be less likely to be in office the second time had the judicial system of New York State respected the outcome of another democracy - a jury in a criminal trial - and sentenced said man to actual punishment instead of not sentencing him at all.
