You Shall Not Follow a Multitude

What Nuremberg Warns Us About the Seductions of Authoritarianism

An occasional commentary in Releasing Memory on how history, popular culture, and our very human nature may hold up a dark mirror and dare us to gaze into it—and see ourselves.

Mirroring Surface Reality: how a bright patina of flowers and lace may serve to cover up darker truths. Credit: Robin Payes

“That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts together—that was the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” ~ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

We like to imagine that evil arrives with a snarl—a monstrous face, a raised fist, a torchlit march easy to condemn. But more often, it comes disguised: in the charm of a narcissist, in the righteousness of a crowd, in the quiet permission we give ourselves to look away.

Watching the new film Nuremberg, the seduction feels chillingly familiar. The story follows a young American Army psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, assigned in 1945 to evaluate the Nazi leadership awaiting trial. Kelley believes he can understand them—diagnose them, outsmart them. Instead, he unwittingly finds himself disarmed by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second in command, who deploys the full arsenal of narcissistic manipulation: flattery, grievance, self-pity, a carefully curated intimacy. Goering portrays himself not as an architect of genocide but as a wounded child molded by humiliation. A loving husband and father who cares deeply how his family is faring while he is imprisoned. He recounts how his mother accepted the patronageand, perhaps, the intimacy of a Jewish benefactor, Dr. Hermann Epenstein, for whom Goering was even named. In the film, Goering claims this early entanglement fueled his lifelong resentment and hatred.

There is no historical evidence that Epenstein fathered Goering, but the psychological symbolism is the point. Goering reframes his own brutality as the inevitable outcome of childhood shame. And Kelley, like so many before and so many after, almost falls for the performance.

Only when the last pieces of evidence fall into place—the now all-too-familiar shock of learning the horrors endured by those liberated from Nazi concentration camps. The films shown at a public trial for the first time showing systematic starvation, enslavement, and factory-scale killings, bureaucratic inventions of mass murder, the gleeful record-keeping, the documents bearing Goering’s signature—does the banality crack, revealing a horror too long rationalized.

But the deeper warning is not about Goering.

It is about us.

The Banality of Thoughtlessness—and Its Afterlives

Hannah Arendt’s controversial phrase “the banality of evil” has often been misunderstood as a claim that evil is an ordinary, everyday faculty. Arendt meant something sharper, more disturbing: that the greatest atrocities are often committed not by demonic masterminds, but by people who surrender their judgment to systems, crowds, and charismatic leaders.

Not monsters, but joiners.

Eichmann “never realized what he was doing,” Arendt wrote, reporting in Jerusalem on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a major architect of the Holocaust, or Shoah, not because he was stupid, but because he refused to think.

Thoughtlessness, she posited, is the soil in which evil is rooted.

Nuremberg confronts us with the question Arendt asked then: How does a civilized society permit such crimes? What seduces ordinary people into complicity? And why are we, again and again, so confident that “it could not happen here”?

These are not abstract historical questions. We are living through a modern moment in which the psychology of authoritarianism—the allure of the savior-leader, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the casual redefinition of cruelty as “strength”—is re-emerging with unsettling speed. The specific targets may change, the rhetoric shifts, but the underlying mechanisms are ancient.

And American exceptionalism, the belief that our institutions, our myths of “exceptionalism” will save us from ourselves, a dangerous lure.

Denial May Help You Sleep Well at Night

One of the most haunting details in Nuremberg comes at the end of the film, during the psychiatrist’s postwar book tour. In a national radio interview, Kelley dared to warn Americans that the psychological patterns he had observed in Goering—the narcissism, the grievance, the hunger for adulation—were not uniquely German; they could arise anywhere. Kelley saw with startling clarity out of first-hand experience how the seeds of authoritarianism can be planted anywhere. At any time.

His stark warnings were met with resistance. He was kicked out of his own interview. American audiences, still basking in the winning of World War II, refused to believe that the same psychological vulnerabilities could exist at home.

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Bearing witness. Who will tell?

I have come of late to interrogate how systematic denial of facts can blind those who survive behind walls of denial. My father served in the Army during that war, enlisted after Pearl Harbor, compelled to action when the attack reached American soil. Daddy was the ultimate patriot.

Though he remained Stateside, I had to believe he—along with the rest of the world—knew something of the horrors being perpetrated against our people—and so many others. That everyday Americans must have had an inkling. How could such a wide-scale extermination campaign be kept secret? Military intelligence. Newspapers and radio. News reels. Synagogues and churches. The stench. Smoke and mirrors.

Decades later, I remember asking my mother, who accompanied Daddy from Army base to Army base, wherever he was stationed, if they knew then what was happening.

“We never knew,” Mom told me, clearly discomfited. “We weren’t told anything.”

Later still, in working on family history, I found records showing more than 250 of Daddy’s distant cousins, Rains (or Reens) from Rotterdam and Amsterdam, were among those shipped off to the camps and factory deaths: Auschwitz. Sobibor. Birkenau. Bergen Belsen. And death camps whose names I have never heard: Monowitz. Neuengamme. Midden Europa.

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The story, the horrors: were they not being told? Was it suppressed through propaganda?

Or was no one listening to inconvenient facts they didn’t want to know? Couldn’t have believed possible?

This allergy to self-examination persists.

It is particularly acute when comparisons are drawn—however tentatively—between contemporary political rhetoric and the early signals of fascism. Many Americans recoil from even the hint of analogy. The Holocaust, they argue, is sacred and incomparable. And it is true that the atrocities of the Nazi regime were singular in scale and mechanization.

But the mechanisms by which societies slide toward dehumanization are not unique at all. They are alarmingly repeatable.

Forced displacement. Registration of “undesirable” groups. Propaganda networks. The erosion of the rule of law.

Demonization of minorities as existential threats. Punitive surveillance. The insistence that loyalty requires silence. “Quiet, Piggy.”

These are not the Final Solution.

But they are the soil from which atrocities grow.

From Over-the-Rhine, a mirrored view of downtown Cincinnati, Ohio , the author’s hometown. The neighborhood so-named because it was settled primarily by German immigrants in the late 1800s. Even growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, we were warned not to speak outside the tribe about being Jewish. Photo credit: Robin Payes

Among some American Jews, this comparison is particularly fraught. For understandable reasons, many believe that as long as the targeting isn’t directed against us, we are safe. Ignore “false” comparisons, and silence confers safety.

But Jewish historical memory should teach the opposite lesson: that the persecution of any minority is a warning to all. The refusal to see parallels does not protect us; it blinds us.

In Exodus, a startlingly relevant injunction appears:

“You shall not follow a multitude to do evil, nor side with the majority in perverting justice.” ~ Exodus 23:2

It is a reminder that majorities can be wrong, crowds can be cruel, and conscience is never a collective undertaking, but a personal one.

And ignorance—or denial—is no excuse.

The Narcissist and the Crowd

Psychologists understand narcissism not simply as self-admiration, but as a system of survival built on shame: a hollow psyche that must constantly validate itself through domination, adoration, or scapegoating. What is particularly dangerous is that narcissism is contagious. Narcissistic leader do not merely perform grievance—they awaken it in others. They legitimize suppressed resentments. They give permission, even encouragement, to direct private anxieties against a public enemy.

This is why the story of Goering’s childhood humiliation still resonates. Whether or not he accurately portrayed it, he weaponized shame into hate and then into power. He offered his childhood wounding as justification for cruelty, and millions embraced it. He did not need to create new hatreds; he only needed to give people a framework that fed their resentments. He turned the mission into a righteous one.

The crowd followed not because they were monsters, but because they were invited to see their own fears reflected and redeemed.

This is precisely what makes contemporary authoritarian movements so powerful. Their appeal lies not in ideology but in psychology: the promise that one’s suffering—real, perceived, or manufactured—can be relieved by punishing others.

The Ancient Warning We Keep Ignoring

We are, once again, in a moment when the multitude is being asked to do evil in the name of protection, identity, belonging. When policies that inflict suffering on marginalized communities are reframed as “necessary,” “lawful,” or “deserved.” When leaders cultivate grievance as a weapon and shame as a rallying cry.

The Exodus verse is not a metaphor: it is instruction.

The Arendt passage is not history: it is diagnosis.

Together, they offer a moral and psychological imperative for our time: Do not seek safety in the crowd. Do not abandon judgment to the majority.

Think.

What Nuremberg makes clear is that authoritarianism does not begin with atrocity. It begins with seduction. With charm. With grievance. With the story a wounded narcissist tells about who hurt him—and who must therefore be punished.

Bringing history to the present to change the future is what Releasing Memory is all about. In that vein, the news that the Harvard Law School has just published a searchable database of documents from the Nuremberg trials to preserve and make public the records of that first-ever international tribunal is welcome. Making that history accessible to the whole world is not just a scholarly exercise, but a sacred one.

Contemporary generations, unlike my parents’, can no longer say, we didn’t know. That we were never warned.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ George Santayana

The questions we face are the same ones that confronted Kelley in the 1940s, Arendt in the 1960s, and the writers of Exodus millennia ago:

- Will we have the courage to recognize the spell before it is too late?

- Will we reject the comfort of the multitude?

- Will we think?

Because thoughtlessness is not just dangerous.

It is the most dangerous force in history.

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In the Field

Follow this up with prompts and resolutions that may help you see things straight up when the world seems to be spinning upside down.