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Nonsense. Hitler was far more rational than average - especially before he overused the meth for too long. I suggest your definition of 'rational' is broken.
In re Hitler being far more rational than average, are you deducing this from the facts that Hitler was far more efficacious than most people (got control of a country and had many of his policies adopted) or do you have specifics about how Hitler was thinking about what he was doing?
What's your evidence? Nazi Germany's government was tremendously dysfunctional, and the Nazis believed many things considered insane even by the average Joe's lowly standards, like "mass-murder is a good thing". Hitler himself was sufficiently dysfunctional that he pretty much failed at everything before going into politics.
I'm not sure they considered it a good thing, maybe they would have preferred to just ship off all the Jews to Madagascar, the Final Solution was a second-best solution that happened to be cheaper and more practical.
And the "average Joe" you're talking about would have to be a Western one - I suspect in many countries, mass murder of some ethnic groups wouldn't be considered insane by everybody's standards, especially in a war situation - either because they're sitting on some land that's "rightfully ours", or they're more economically successful, or they're not-very-well integrated immigrants, etc.
By the way, Hitler isn't always seen as a Big Bad Guy by the non-Western world, sometimes he's just considered a pretty bad-ass leader like Stalin or Napoleon. When a german friend of mine met her new colleagues at a Chinese univiersity's biology lab, one of them said "Oh, you're German! Like Hitler! Cool! thumbs up". And the Chinese find that the Westerners don't seem that aware of how nasty the Japanese were.
Emile:
I've read about some hilarious examples of non-Westerners who perceive Hiter as a distant and exotic historical figure, completely oblivious to how Westerners are apt to react to his mention. Like for example the parents of this Indian politician:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Lu_Hitler_Marak
That's nothing, I once saw a restaurant called Genghis Khan's Mongolian BBQ.
I dated a Mongolian for a bit, and apparently in that culture Genghis Khan is still highly regarded as a founding figure.
I didn't realise that Genghis was an actual genocide (worse than any other conqueror), but apparently he was.
But if history is written by the victors, then of course we'll see him more positively than we do Hitler. It'll be a while until they rename the main airport in Berlin!
I've heard estimates that put the total death toll of aftermath of the various wars Genghis Khan waged at ~40 million people. The estimates for all the Mongol conquests go from a low of ~30 to a high of 60 million.
Its mind-boggling to consider that isn't that much better than WW2 (low estimates 40, high estimates 72 million). It just gets ridiculous once we remember that population at that time was somewhere in the 300 to 400 million range.
We would probably have had to go nuclear or biological to get the death toll anywhere near 7,5 to 17% of global population!
With distance the atrocities get forgotten. Many well known leaders in the past did pretty bad stuff. I am usually surprised how kings and queens still get items named after them while dictators usually get institutionally forgotten and purged.
s/Berlin/Ulaanbaatar/
(Works without substitution.)
Say more?
(The Ulaanbaastar airport has been renamed for the famous Mongolian conquerer but...) it'll be a while until they rename the main airport in Berlin (after Adolf Hitler, because Hitler is a loser and Genghis Khan is a winner).
I see people running around with Che Guevara T-shirts.
And people bow to and kiss the Torah.
David Mitchell has a youtube video on the subject.
There is also a group "Sons of Korah" who sing remixes of the Psalms. Including Psalm 137. Which builds up to:
The Sons of Korah version makes it sound a little better:
Still, it is a recent band singing joyously about genocide. (It is a little better given that the Psalm was written by people at a time when they had just been conquered and the same atrocities done to them, crying out to a power for vengeance.)
They are actually really catchy, and most of their songs (and the Psalms themselves) are reasonably poetic.
The comedian looks young enough to not remember the extent to which there's been a big campaign to take rape seriously.
Earlier, (and to a lesser extent still) it could be presented with enough distance to be a subject of humor. For example, I can remember when a boss chasing a secretary around a desk was considered funny.
More recently, prison rape was a reliable joke in general. Now there are social circles where such jokes aren't welcome but I wouldn't say it's a sort of joke you absolutely can't get away with.
With the recent research on the effects of concussion, I don't think the old cartoons (with the character looking dazed and the little birds chirping as they circle his head) are going to look quite the same as they used to.
To some large extent, people notice what they're told to notice. This doesn't mean I think it's all signaling, but I think perception is very much shaped by social pressure.
He hits the nail on the head: "At the point when everyone who fought in [the World Wars], and everyone who remembers anyone who fought in them, has died, surely they'll become as comic as the Vikings."
After all, the purpose of moral disapproval of atrocities is simply to avoid offending anyone who could be personally connected to them†. Even when people acknowledge that there's nothing besides length of time separating ancient genocides from modern ones, there's just no way to spark the same feeling of outrage.
† Of course, longstanding cultural divides can keep offense alive even when the secondhand witnesses are gone; the Armenian genocide shows no sign of becoming funny, because the acknowledgment of it is a continuing rift between Armenians and Turks.
Personal connection is in the mind, as you say later. I've been looking at the "It would have been me" aspect of the past, and I think it's mostly trained in.
A major reason that the Holocaust is taken very seriously is that there are people who believe that doing so will make a repetition less likely. I don't know how long it would take for that to fade out.
I also don't know how close we are to longevity tech, but when such exists, the past is presumably going to fade more slowly.
On the relativity of what is considered serious-- I think there's been a bit of a shift lately, but when you think about Hitler's atrocities, you probably mostly think about the Holocaust. He was also responsible for tens of millions of deaths as the result of WWII, but that doesn't get the same publicity, probably because building an empire is viewed as sort of normal behavior. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Shaka Zulu, and Napoleon aren't usually counted as mass murderers.
Alexander the Great, Shaka Zulu and Napoleon were 'just' empire builders. Genghis Khan, on the other hand, make Hitler look like a fluffy puppy in every way except temporal and social proximity.
That the Jews were slaves in Egypt [1] has been commemorated every year for at least 2500 years-- possibly 3000 years or so.
I wouldn't expect it to fade quickly.
[1] This is disputed-- there doesn't seem to be any solid evidence of it.
That's absurd. When I disapprove of Serbs (and Greek volunteers) massacring civilians in Srebrenica, it's not because I want to avoid offending people, it's because I want to offend them into shame, so that they stop supporting policies and parties in my own nation (Greece) that will make a repetition of the butchery and support of such butchery, likely.
You talk as if all discussion of politics is a signalling of status, rather than a sometimes hopeless attempt to influence the future into a better direction.
You're right, of course- my comment needs modification. I'm just talking about the case where one isn't really angry about an old atrocity, but would still hesitate to make a joke about it. I'm not made of Hansons all the way down.
But this time we got video.
Assuming a non-Singularity future where all the second-order witnesses have died, one would not expect many people to go and watch video of 20th-century atrocities. I mean, first-hand accounts of the Spanish Inquisition and the genocide of the Americas exist. How much of them have you read?
(In high school, we read a few excerpts at most; I did read this book in college, thanks to its Great Books focus. Of course, I read plenty in high school about slavery, but that's because the Civil War is still tied to current cultural divides in the U.S.)
You mean this hasn't happened already?
As noted in the Mitchell video, there are comical pieces set in the World Wars, but one has to be careful how one writes it. Catch-22 is a black comedy, as are Blackadder Goes Forth, Life is Beautiful and most of the other comedies set in 20th century wars.
The simplest way to put it, perhaps, is to note that Mel Brooks could do the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution in straightforward screwball style, but had to do Hitler as a musical-within-a-movie.
It's been a while since I've read it, but I think all the viewpoints were in the military and about the treadmill of being trapped into flying unlimited bombing missions. There was nothing from the point of view of the people on the ground who were being bombed, was there?
I've seen that plenty of times. Seems to be a fairly common university-campus phenomenon, especially for students in the humanities.
I'm not sure if there are any cultures whose folk historical memory of Genghis Khan involves the same visceral horror as the present-day Western reaction to Hitler. So while this is an accurate historical parallel, it might not be one in terms of unintentional hilarity.
If Hitler had ended up winning the war, there may not be that much memory of visceral horror either by now.
Though according to Wikipedia, there are some places where Genghis is still a very bad memory, for ending the Islamic Golden Age and all that.
And note that there isn't general visceral horror about the Soviet Union, even though it committed mass murder on a grand scale. You can wear or display Soviet stuff without it being taken nearly as badly as if you were wearing or displaying Nazi stuff.
Although not Soviet himself, Soviet fanboy Che Guevara is another example. I'm not an expert on Latin American history, but some things I've read make me never want to buy a Che T-shirt.
http://www.slate.com/id/2107100/
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1535
[...]
"I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why" is a scary testament to the power of social proof, and the double standards applied to the perpetrators of atrocities based on sympathy towards their ideology.
Do you think people wearing Che shirts without knowing why increases the risk of massively destructive political choices?
It could be because, while the Soviet Union was generally oppressive, it severely toned down the murderin' during the last ~40 years of its eight-decade history, whereas Nazi Germany spent over half of its brief history conquering Europe and conducting genocide, and then collapsed while it was right in the middle of such activities.
The Soviet Union also wasn't in a desperate war for survival with the people with whom those with the most power to declare things offensive closely identify.
A more important reason I suspect is that communism as a whole is bigger and Soviet iconography can be indicative of loyalty to some harmless local brand. A british trotskyist waving a hammer and sickle is emphatically not a big fan of the USSR.
There may be places where nazi iconography mostly signals loyalty to some local band of fascists but those local nazis are probably associated with or are violent thugs, not reformist presidential candidates.
Now that you bring it up, I realize I don't know why people wear Soviet stuff. I'd assumed it was a combination of liking the art style (it's at least distinctive and not much like anything being done currently) and the wish to be a little edgy, but there are other possibilities.
Depends on the country. In hungary some symbols from the SU are outlawed atm.
Ironically, the equivalent exists too, or at least it did at one point.
And the Dark Horde in the SCA was a reference to killing on the grand scale long enough ago that it could be considered just slightly edgy, I think.
Stalin is seen as a Big Bad Guy where I am. I had no idea this is not the case throughout the Western world.
I think Stalin is seen as a big bad guy in the West at least among the more educated.
But people like Napoleon and Genghis Khan do get a free pass. Especially the latter should be a source of cognitive dissonance even though Napoleon is far from a innocent little lamb either.
Because Australia was already taken...
On top of that, an unfortunately large number of americans were disappointed that japan surrendered when it did, and wanted to drop the rest of the usa's arsenal anyway. You would be hard pressed to find a society where everyone is actually as nice as they want people to believe.
Thinking Mass-murder is a good thing is not insane as in being irrational its insane as in "these values make as much sense as baby eaters to me!".
I believe the word for "goals which fundamentally clash with my goals" is not "insane" or "irrational", but "evil". Someone who has goals I consider evil may well be quite intelligent, sane, and rational.
I don't think "goals which fundamentally clash with my goals" is quite what you mean, here.
For example, if I want the last cookie, and you also want the last cookie, our goals clash, but neither of us is necessarily evil (nor insane, nor irrational).
It sounds to me like the word konkvistador wants is "alien."
Yes.
Perhaps "fundamentally" was too opaque. We both want a cookie, but it's not a top level goal for either of us. Given that, either of us might be argued out of wanting a cookie by rational means. If acquiring a cookie were a top level goal for both of us, and there were no other ways to acquire cookies than to take the last cookie, then we would each be evil in the value system of the other.
I hope I've been clearer. :)
A paperclipper has a top level goal that clashes with my own, but I wouldn't call it evil.
If there was a species of aliens whose top level goal was the extermination of all happiness in the universe, I would call that evil.
Evil is not just the clashing of goals. I would probably define it as "the intentional pursuit of disutility".
Or if you want an even more technical description, evil is "a utility function that incorporates a negative factor for the utility of others".
As the paperclipper cares zero for mankind, that's not innately evil. Hatred of others is evil, sadism is evil, spitefulness is evil.
Evil has the unfortunate baggage of implying that there is something "objectively" wrong with what the "evil" guys are doing, not just wrong as judged by say my or your values.
I'm perfectly satisfied with pursuing my values even when they are as arbitrary as my opponents, I don't need to consider my value set something special beyond it being mine.
BTW This topic made me reread: Are your enemies innately evil?
It only implies "objectively wrong" if you believe in objective morality. But even if you do, the term "evil" also implies that your top goals and theirs conflict, so it works even then. The alternative, it seems, is to have "evil" be a term we can't use under any circumstances, which just means some other word or phrase will come to mean what "evil" meant before we stopped using it, and it looks like you're using "alien" for that purpose in the other branch of this thread.
The 19 hijackers (or Hitler, as originally mentioned) were not (necessarily) irrational, stupid, insane, or otherwise mentally damaged. Nor were their motivations completely opaque or untranslatable, as "alien" implies -- any human could understand their position given the effort to do so, unpleasant though it might be. Their goals were just incompatible with our goals, and only one set of goals could win. It seems to me that evil is exactly what that means.
That definition doesn't work, because for starters it deprives you of the possibility to declare some of your own goals as evil.
Also the way I normally use the word, 'evil' goals certainly conflict with my own (I want to think), but not all goals that conflict with my own are evil.
'Evil' can be much more precisely defined in a way customarily understood if you consider it to be "the intentional pursuit of disutility".
If I'm doing something that incidentally hurts someone else, that may be wrong but it's not evil. If I'm doing something that hurts someone else, because I want them hurt, so that if they stop hurting by this action I'll have to find some other way to hurt them, that's evil.
If you want to destroy a beautiful forest in order to build a powerplant, that's not evil. If you want to destroy a beautiful forest because you want people to stop loving its beauty, that's evil.
If you don't believe evil exists, you've never heard of sadistic and spiteful people.
I wouldn't have a problem with describing a system whose motivations I understand, but which lead it to make decisions I can't imagine myself ever making or endorsing, as "alien."
But I agree that this has nothing to do with whether our goal-systems motivate mutually exclusive states of the world. (For which I usually use the word "opponent.")
But most people do work with a implicit belief in objective morality even if they seldom do stop to think about it. Isn't it a bit misleading to use it in another sense without clarification? Though of course the kind of person who typically visits LW would probably not be confused.
Also let me point out that "evil" has a whole host of associations in Western popular culture and especially in fiction, saying something is evil can in certain circumstances be like saying something is Elvish. Sure most of these don't ever make it into serious thinking, but they are there and can be employed in say propaganda.
Well baby eaters aren't really that hard to understand. Looking back it seems that I may have affirmed the use of alien to describe this without thinking about it too much, a tendency to complete patterns in familiar ways I suppose .
I don't think the question of whether one's top goal(s) rely on an objective morality would really change the sense of "evil" for most people.
It's unclear to me whether your second paragraph was intended as disagreement, since evil in fiction is often even more relative than I would argue. :)
The Nazis also believed many sane things, like exercise and the value of nature and animal welfare and the harmful nature of smoking.
Possible rationalist exercise:
I'm a very bad rationalist. I have a strongly preferred answer to those questions.
Of course, it's hard to predict what the amount of murder would have been-- they wanted to wipe out the Poles, but didn't have enough time.
I do think you've just given a argument for why measuring in terms of lives isn't good enough if it treats suffering as irrelevant.
It's completely obvious why there is no doubt in my mind-- I've spent a lot of years believing that if I'd been there, I'd be one of the corpses. I don't think I have an obligation to be that abstract about the happy healthy people who might have resulted if Nazism had been unopposed.
I've slept on this, and here are a couple of more angles.
I've read a fair amount of argument about racism, sexism, and related topics, and have been considerably influenced as a result-- and not always in the ways anyone in the arguments intended. I'm still sorting the thing out.
Two of the things I took away is that power isn't given, it's taken, and that I'm not obligated to be polite or neutral when I'm advocating for my right to exist.
These played into my response. I suspect I would have reacted more calmly if the question had been raised as "What do you think?" rather than as a test of rationality.
The thing is, I don't think that approach is entirely right or entirely wrong. After I'd posted, I was getting into what I think is a trained response of wondering whether Less Wrong was worth bothering with if things like gwern's comment could be said here. I believe that sort of purity-driven reaction is actually unwise, especially when it's other people's ideas about purity, but I still have to dig past other people's status issues that I've picked up.
I don't think the privilege model is entirely false-- look at what happened when Eliezer brought up his problems with exercise and weight loss. Most of the people who replied didn't notice what he actually said, and just rolled forward with the usual advice. Eliezer's situation is in a blind spot which is highly socially supported, and even people who are quite intelligent and working on rationality got snagged by the blind spot. The result was harder on Eliezer than it was on them.
At the same time, I don't want to tell people that they should have known better, though it's very tempting. I'm sensitized to that particular issue because I've been fascinated by it. Not everyone is.
Tying the two topics back together, I was fascinated by the fact that Nazis were the first to connect smoking and lung cancer. You mean "health Nazi" isn't just a random metaphor?
What can happen when utilitarianism meets obesity
I at first had a similar reaction to yours, but perhaps more severe. I was somewhat humbled and even slightly ashamed to be honest by how reasonable your response was. After thinking about it in a dispassionate sense I realized that especially considering the context there is nothing worth getting upset over. I mean there are discussions about baby eaters where people didn't get upset over billions of hypothetical alien teenagers dying painfully because of their parents preferences in the baby-eater civilization. This scenario:
Isn't really any less hypothetical unless someone comes up with a time machine or we where posting on a site that was actively hostile to the groups that would suffer dis-utility in such a scenario (where it would serve as fantasy).
gwern really highlighted a blind-spot of mine (mind-killing conditioning) with her questions and while I can't judge what effect this has on other people, particularly the net effect, I am very grateful for the personal insight.
I'm impressed how status signaling resistant LW community is, at least it seems resistant to the kinds of signaling that get a strong conditioned response from me. It does have some blind-spots but these don't seem to be exactly the same as those of the man on the street or society at large.
Least convenient world. National socialism limiting itself to a fair chunk of Europe results in a net gain in life, and perhaps even say net gain in happy productive pain free years by say the current date.
Even in this scenario I don't think anyone here expects people to cheer-lead a system that would most likley lead to their death or the death of their family regardless of its utility (or dis-utility).
Grudging acceptance is the most one can reasonably demand of a person.
But here I'm going to go on a limb and flat out say it that when the difference between being selfish and not being selfish is survival I think it inhumane (in the sense of being out of sync with most of humanities values, despite what Christianity tries to convince a good 2 billion) to punish it if the gain is only marginal.
The localized suffering needs to be significantly smaller than the globalized gains.
I'll come out and admit bias here since I and all my family and many of my friends would also be most definitely dead in this scenario (or better said our grandparents would most definitely be dead).
My number is a profit of 30 million happy productive man years (in other words a scenario where the suffering just balances out the grains has disutlitly compared to the present, I do have other values than people being generally well off and yes some are selfish.
one question I pondered at times is if the experiments done on prisoner by Mengele and others actually lead to anything interesting. In theory the lack of ethics would allow for more research with less effort. But it seems they did not, and actually worked rather sloppy. I guess that is preferably, because otherwise the ethics people would have a hard time keeping eager researchers in check.
There are interesting data on hypothermia based on Nazi human experimentation, which are especially interesting because it's impossible to replicate these measurements for obvious reasons. The ethics of using and citing those have been a matter of controversy for decades:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/experi02_no.html
Otherwise, however, the human experiments done by Nazi doctors seem to have been scientifically worthless. Mengele in particular was just a particularly cruel dilettante.
Poll: what studies would you do if ethics were not a constraint?
There's a lot of stuff involving patient secrecy that would be convenient to not worry about. Conglomerating everyone's medical records could result in dramatic gains in knowledge on efficacy of treatment. But it should be possible to do that in a way that respects patient secrecy, and I don't think ethics is the true rejection there.
There are a number of cases where people consider it unethical to use controls. AZT is a famous example, where they stopped the study midway through because AZT was so effective for the experimental group, but then some nasty side effects started showing up- and it was unclear how much was due to the AZT, because there wasn't a control group to compare to anymore.
(Assuming that not only institutional ethics but my own sense of morality is not a constraint.)
A lot of the really interesting things we know about broad-scale human neurology, particularly some tricky stuff about the nature of consiousness, are due to the study of people who have suffered brain damage. If there were no ethical constraints, I would deliberately induce carefully controlled forms of brain damage on humans and observe the results.
I'm afraid I have no citations handy for this, but I seem to recall reading that a number of Nazi medical experiments, such as the ones simulating (fatal) high altitude exposure, were in fact quietly studied and used by the occupiers, in addition to the more famous rocketry and other research. (Probably the more bizarre experiments, like Mengele's torture of twins, did not attract the military's interest.)
I also read once that Japanese intelligence agencies made a deal with the Americans to turn over the results from their biowarfare units in exchange for them being quietly overlooked and not included in the war crimes tribunals that executed the likes of Hideki Tōjō.
You are right that the Nazi run government, despite popular opinion, was very inefficient and dysfunctional from several points of view.
However it seems to have done a pretty good job of:
Arguably these where all primary objectives Hitler had in mind.
You also seem to be too quick to dismiss the IQ and instrumental rationality needed to rise to the rank of top politician or world leader. As well as underestimate the tendency of high IQ people to have more radical political positions. While top Nazis don't seem to have been particularly brilliant (especially the lower half is disappointing, cost of ethnic and ideological nepotism I suppose), Hitler was probably in the upper half of the group (warning slight mind-killer danger in the commentary). My guesstimation would perhaps put him a bit below three sigma above the Austrian average.
I think Hitler was more intelligent than average, and a great deal more instrumentally rational. He just didn't have more accurate beliefs about the world.
This might get me down voted, but I don't think Hitler hated Jews because he had a misconception or two about them or was a result of a honest mistake, I think he would have at least disliked them strongly anyway. This is probably however not true of most German National socialists at the time.
I also don't think he was ok with getting rid of those tiresome Slavs in the East because he had misconceptions about them, he wanted to get rid of them because they where sitting on land that could be used by his tribe. This particular bit is generally part of a very ancient and in humans very viable value system.
A good way to remind yourself of why indifference of a AI god would be horrifying is the realization that its perfectly possible the Hitler had no real ill will towards Russians or Poles once controlled for his dislike of Communism but that the moral worth of them in his value system just happened to be zero.
Humans can and do have very different value systems.
This was the kind of thing I had in mind when I suggested a broken definition of 'rational'. Hitler was more rational than average, not more all round virtuous.
When suggesting exercises I have two in cache.
I) Compare the antisemitic policies of the 3rd Reich with those of other 1st world nations from the same time. Also see what policies where used regarding treatment of permanently ill.
II) take a look into what their view of the world was actually based on. Try to understand what made a person of sound mind subscribe to that belief. Also interesting to do with current interest groups.
One more exercise: spot the excess 'h'.
The question deserves at least a thorough looking at. Something happened that made the unsuccessful painter into a dictator of one of the most developed countries in the middle of europe. That might be that he did something right, or maybe he got lucky. But probably both.
For fellow dictatorship researchers it might be good to know that there are others with similar stories that also deserve to be looked at.
Hard to test, but there's Alice Miller's theory in For Your Own Good. She researched the advice about child-rearing which was popular among the parents of the generations that wanted Hitler.
The advice was for the parents to demand extreme obedience starting at six months old, and Miller's claim is that those generations were primed to want an authoritarian leader.
I recommend the book for rationalists-- even if Miller is wrong about Hitler's rise, it's still important to have examples of how much authoritative sounding advice is just people making things up.
One of the hard questions for understanding extreme success is figuring out how much of a success is a matter of generalizable traits like hard work, and how much is happening to have a personality which fits well into a particular situation.
There's also the intermediate possibility of having a personality which is a pretty good fit plus the generalizable trait of being perceptive and flexible enough to make a pretty good fit into an excellent fit.
More theory about fit: The Money Game, which claimed that a lot of stock market success was happening to have a personality which fit the condition the market was in for a few years.
Parenting advice of earlier generations is terrifying. They used to tell people not to cuddle their babies! That they'd be actively harming the kids by encouraging dependence!
Fortunately, it seems that in practice caregivers (read: mothers) largely ignored this advice. They still cuddled their babies; they just felt weak and ashamed as they did so.
For all we know, it's not that unlikely that they were right, or at least that cuddling isn't strictly better than not cuddling (either it doesn't make a difference, or each has consequences we would consider as beneficial and consequences we would consider harmful).
(disclaimer: I cuddle my baby. So far he hasn't killed millions of jews, but he's only a few months old, so it may not be a significant datapoint)
No, actually, we have substantial evidence now that babies need skin-to-skin contact to thrive. Because the maternal instinct is very strong in this direction (for a good reason) the data about what happens to babies who are not cuddled mostly comes from orphanages. It's a very sad answer.
OK, that probably should have been "for all I know" :P
Well, not touching babies will cause serious issues; I don't know if cuddling per se is required.
I read lots of Miller, and also some of the Psychohistory stuff (Basically the history of child raising and its influence on the society of the next generation)
It is however important to notice that both are highly controversial, and maybe simplify complicated issues.
In case you want to raise a dictator it is not enough to severely abuse the kid and let it grow in absolute despair. I would expect there is something else that plays a role. And I am curious to know what it is.
The point wasn't about how to raise a dictator, it was about how to raise a population which would want a dictator.
This doesn't necessarily mean they weren't rational, only that if they were their utility function was very different from yours. (Though Hanlon's razor -- and this which is a pretty good argument for it -- makes me assign a higher prior probability for the former than for the latter. I haven't looked for evidence which would raise or lower that prior, though.)