Could you do a better job of fighting World War II than Adolf Hitler? That may seem like an odd question. But if you’ve ever played a grand strategy game or talked to military buffs, you may have already answered it. Coming up with pet theories of how a more coldly efficient and less insane and wasteful Axis could have won WWII is a common pastime in these communities.
The missing megalomaniac
My particular encounter with it came during a graduate military analysis course. To keep everything constant throughout the semester, we stuck entirely to WWII in Europe and North Africa. It went beyond merely studying history. The professor pushed us to take particular battles and campaigns and evaluate the possible and probable distribution of outcomes.
It was a very stimulating experience, but also could be quite intense. My classmates were very brilliant and they sometimes intimidated me.
When you take a specialized course like this, you may sit across from a guy with a suspiciously thorough grasp of the primary sources. You’ll wonder if he somehow lived through the war and stopped aging after 1945. A few chairs away from the possible immortal might be an active duty military officer that chimes in during the El Alamein discussion with a personal anecdote about the difficulties of desert logistics. Hard to compete with that.
It wasn’t surprising that they could assemble thoughtful counterfactuals in which Germany might have beaten the Allies or at least evaded total destruction. There was just one problem: they needed a Rational Hitler.
The actual fuhrer of Germany was an turbulent, compulsive, unfocused, and thoroughly opportunistic gambler. His bizarre and hateful ideology was inseparable from his conduct as a wartime political leader. The Hitler their cunning stratagems required simply did not exist.
But, as the Moneyball quote goes, “we can build him in the aggregate.”
Rational Hitler theories
“Rational Hitler Theory” is my shorthand 1 for a type of analysis that is by no means exclusive to WWII or even military history. It’s a close cousin of “steelmanning” in political debates. You do Rational Hitler Theorizing 2 when you come up with an elaborate plan for an entity totally incapable of implementing it.
Part of it is just that coming up with Rational Hitler Theories is like watching the “Viking vs Samurai” episode of Deadliest Warrior. Yeah, it’s not really plausible. But it can still be entertaining if you don’t take it too seriously. There’s always a time and place for that.
The more important factor behind the allure of Rational Hitlerizing is the persistence of generalized mind-body dualism. A Rational Hitler is a disembodied big brain that can’t survive implantation inside its intended host. He’s a little guy inside a cranial cockpit trying and failing to mecha-pilot the body attached to it. 3 But we still want to believe he’ll be able to pull it off anyway. 4
Working towards the Fuhrer
One of the hardest things to accept in a specifically organizational context is how difficult it is to get desirable outcomes out of formalized planning processes decoupled from management and implementation. If a particular course of action arrived at via external objective analysis is so obviously correct, why didn’t the people inside come up with it?
There’s a good deal of invisible context that gets lost when you’re only observing at a distance, and people who know it often can’t articulate it very well. But even if you could come up with something much better without that immersion, you’d still need to find a way it could actually work in practice.
That’s why Rational Hitler Theories can start as what the organization ought to do only to become second-order theories of how the organization could be changed to implement the original theory. I might begin by telling you what you need to do, but I’ll probably get bogged down trying to get you to make radical life changes so you’ll listen to my advice and correctly implement it.
If you still want to play Rational Hitler, you should do it to get a better idea of what you don’t know about the situation of interest and the people dealing with it. Leave the rest for your Paradox Interactive game library on Steam. 5
Footnotes
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I’m very certain that I didn’t come up with it, but I’m uncertain of who actually did. ↩
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I like the name for its comical value, but it shouldn’t be construed as a serious argument about whether Hitler meets social/behavioral science definitions of rationality. That entire topic is too big of a mess to get into here. ↩
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Ah, the good old homunculus fallacy. ↩
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No matter how hard physicalists try, dualism simply isn’t going away. ↩
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If you’re upset that this is Rational Hitler Theory as opposed to Rational Tojo Theory I’ve got you covered. ↩