Isaiah Berlin on understanding Nazis and other fanatics
Do not call them mad
A Russian Jew who lived through the Russian Revolution and came to England with his family in 1921, when he was twelve, Isaiah Berlin spent most of his life at Oxford, specializing in the history of ideas and in the defense of liberalism and value pluralism. He wrote very few books, but his various addresses and papers were assembled into many. This insight comes from Reflections of a Historian of Ideas, a book of interviews with Berlin.
Imagination can feed fanaticism, but imaginative insight into situations very different from yours must in the end weaken it. Take the Nazis, a very extreme example: people said that they were mad, pathological cases. This seems to me too glib, too easy, too dismissive.
The Nazis were led to believe by those who preached to them by word of mouth or printed words that there existed people, correctly described as sub-human, Untermenschen, and that these persons were poisonous creatures, who undermined true, i.e. Germanic or Nordic, culture. The proposition that there are Untermenschen is quite simply false, empirically false, demonstrable nonsense.
But if you believe it, because someone has told you so, and you trust this persuader, then you arrive at a state of mind where, in a sense quite rationally, you believe it necessary to exterminate Jews — this does not spring from lunacy, nor is it mere irrational hatred or contempt or an aggressive tendency, though no doubt these help . . . .
No, these emotions are organized by means of belief in monstrous untruths, taught systematically by orators or writers; demonstrably false, but clearly stated, doctrines which issue in crimes which lead to dreadful cruelties and vast destructive catastrophes.
I think one must be careful in calling thinking people mad or pathological. Persecution need not be insane: only spring from a conviction of the truth of appallingly false beliefs, which can lead to the most unspeakable consequences. If one wishes to prevent the harm done by fanatics, one must try to understand the intellectual, not merely the psychological, roots of their beliefs; one must try to demonstrate to them that they are wrong.
If this fails, then one may have to go to war against them. But the attempt to persuade must always be made.
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