"He was a nice man and a good boss."

That is what Hitler's maid said about him. The psychology of evil is not the psychology of mental illness, and this is the episode that pulls them apart.

Rosa Mitterer went to work at the Berghof as a teenager and broke her silence in 2008, at ninety-one. Asked what he was like, she said he was charming, that he was only ever nice to her, and that he was a great boss to work for. She was telling the truth. Roger's point is that being nice and being evil are not opposites, and that the man who was kind to his staff and gentle with his dog is the same man.

So he draws the two by two every consultant draws. One axis is evil. One axis is mental illness. Four quadrants, and the one almost nobody talks about is the person who is evil and not ill at all. Those, Roger says, are the most frightening people he has met. The quadrant that suffers is the other one: people who are mentally ill and not evil, who get lumped in with the first group every time something terrible happens.

What we cover:

• Thomas Sowell's tragic vision: human beings are improvable but not perfectible, and there are no solutions, only trade offs
• Why the founders split power across three co-equal branches, and what that says about what they believed about people
• The French Revolution restarted the calendar at year zero and changed the hours in a day. The only thing of value that survived it was the metric system
• Rosa Mitterer, the Berghof, and a dog named Blondi
• Dignity and depravity: the same person, made in the image of God and capable of anything
• Children of alcoholics are four to seven times more likely to become alcoholic. Do the arithmetic against the base rate and the death sentence disappears

Roger's line, and the reason this episode exists: "I don't trust people who aren't really aware of their own fallibility."

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
1:09 The tragic vision: people are a mix
1:54 There are no solutions, only trade offs
2:40 Why the founders built three branches
3:59 The French Revolution started at year zero
5:21 The guillotine, and Rwanda in Paris
6:25 Aware of your own fallibility
6:54 Dignity and depravity
8:24 Four quadrants: evil and mentally ill
9:24 The most frightening people I have met
10:34 Hitler's maid: he was a nice man and a good boss
11:54 Who actually suffers from the confusion
12:55 Violent crime, and what the base rate says
14:39 Children of alcoholics, and the backwards correlation
16:24 Start with compassion

Second Thoughts, Episode 73.

Dr. Roger Hall is a Peak Performance Psychologist who helps leaders master their thinking and achieve greater power, freedom, clarity, and calm.

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