Adolf Hitler has been called the most documented human in history though
He’s not really known for being a bad leader, to be fair. Kind of the opposite. A bad leader wouldn’t have been able to rally an entire country to commit genocide.
Yes he is. His military decision making was thankfully shit, his hatred of Jews caused a brain drain ahead of the war; nuclear research wasn’t prioritized because it was considered a “Jewish science”. Also his rearmament of Germany was completely unsustainable and would have collapsed the German economy if not for the onset of the war. Effective demagoguery =/= successful leadership.
If I set out to make a thousand year empire that only lasted 11 years would you consider that successful leadership?
He was great at leading them to lose. I am only defining leadership in the sense of “leading people.” He was great at that. Just not at tactics or strategy or sane ideas.
Nero?
I think the idea you’re driving at is that the worst leaders in human history will drive us to extinction. That’s not the scary thought to me. The scary thought to me is that decent or even good leaders might do the same when put in the wrong position. There are plenty of cases where individual rational decisions combine to disastrous consequences for all involved. I wonder if it’s possible for humanity to continually avoid such survival-threatening prisoners’ dilemmas…
Wow that’s even scarier than what I had in mind. Good intentions all the way down.
The fucked up thing about humanity is that we invented our own destruction, put a shiny red button on top and wrote on it “do not touch”. As if there would ever be a scenario where pressing it would make sense. And seeing the rethoric coming out of Russia these days, I can’t help but wonder. Damn, I guess this is what my parents lived with at the height of the Cold War?
Guess I was too cryptic. The worst leaders in human history aren’t here yet, or at least I hope they aren’t. You will briefly recognise them by the sound of the ICBMs detonating before we all go up in flames.
