19 ms·

I don't think I'm reading this wrong, but I'm definitely reading it differently than most commenters here: > the intelligence & character of the masses are inc

• crhulls 3y ago
  Could you also possibly be projecting your values on to Einstein? There is a tendency to modernize or whitewash the views of heroes of the past so they pass muster today. A generation ago we had far less reticence to categorize and rank people, for better and for worse. I don’t know enough about Einstein to have a strong opinion here so this is a question more than rebuttal. Does he normally write in loose metaphor or is he generally straight to the point?
  • martincmartin 3y ago
    Keep in mind that Einstein was a German Jew, and 1939 was after Hitler had come to power, passed all sorts of extreme anti-Jewish laws, and then started World War II. So it's a fair bet this is really about "how could so many people vote for and support Nazis?"
    • kvetching 3y ago
      This is a good video for answering that question https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=830fVdBYJzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=830fVdBYJzc
  • john-radio 3y ago
    I don't know whether Einstein meant "the intelligent few are more intelligent than the masses, collectively" or "individually," but it's not fair for you to say that one reading is "loose metaphor" while the other is completely straightforward; either interpretation is sensible.
    • kspacewalk2 3y ago
      One is completely straightforward whereas the other is ambiguous. Only one interpretation is sensible without making a big assumption about the author's views.
      • Retric 3y ago
        Your “straightforward interpretation” hinges of what he means by “produce some thing valuable for the community.” Did he mean valuable things like bread, or only extreme value like electrodynamics? Well he didn’t say “extreme value” and it’s easy to argue the character of productive members of society is above that of pickpockets so that fits. So IMO a straightforward interpretation would be calling the great masses of humanity dumb rather than extolling the virtues of bakers.
        • auggierose 3y ago
          In the lines before he mentioned flying and electric waves, so I think he means that. Bread would fall under commodities. There is really only one way to read his message. Which is a good thing, given that it is intended to be transmitted across 5000 years.
          • Retric 3y ago
            He calls out the lack of commodities as a problem to be addressed, unlike flying and radio which are suggested to be solved problems. “everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle” not fear of failing to create the next wonder. Thus emphasizing the critical nature of workers. It’s easy to read as pro social safety net or event collectivist terms. But stating a problem alone doesn’t suggest a solution.
  • trey-jones 3y ago
    To answer your question - "yes" I definitely could be projecting my own values. Just as everyone else reading it another way could be projecting their own. We all have our biases. I do recognize that. I'm also not beholden to the language used (incomparably). To me that reinforces my interpretation, but of course often the interpreters can assign more meaning to a word than the author intended. I'm not saying mine is the right answer, but I definitely think it is an answer.
  • georgeplusplus 3y ago
    Einsteins time period was the golden era of libertarianism and individualism were more mainstream especially during WW1, so it doesn't come to me as surprising that Einstein would write something like that. The famous books of that era have many central themes and elements of individualism from authors such as Orwell, Tolkien, Huxley.
    • panarchy 3y ago
      Einstein's time period was also one critical of fascism with one of the points of discussion from then on that was talking about how large masses of people can turn into horrible unintelligible creatures that lead to the likes of the holocaust.
    • jakeinspace 3y ago
      Sure but Einstein was a socialist.
      • Obscurity4340 3y ago
        I love how to vote or rail against socialism is, in some sense, to say "Nah, Einstein don't know shit, surely I'm smarter than that man." Also don't call me "Surely" Also, why do the Nazis have "Socialist" in their moniker if they were fascist? Can a society/political movement be socialist and fascist simultaneously?
        • flextheruler 3y ago
          Yes it was a racial socialism as opposed to class socialism.
        • robertlagrant 3y ago
          Einstein didn't have the 20th century as reference. > Also, why do the Nazis have "Socialist" in their moniker if they were fascist? Can a society/political movement be socialist and fascist simultaneously? They're both high authoritarian societies. Nazis were just for murder along geographic and racial boundaries rather than class boundaries.
  • usefulcat 3y ago
    > Could you also possibly be projecting your values on to Einstein? I think this misses the forest for the trees. IMO, even if the GPs interpretation is wrong, it's still a far more interesting and insightful observation (that groups so often behave so much worse than individuals) than the alternative (some people are a lot smarter than others).
    • _factor 3y ago
      It’s ok to be wrong and insightful. It’s not ok to attribute it incorrectly.
  • arde 3y ago
    The collective "intelligence and character of the masses" was a topic of the highest relevance back in 1939, particularly to a Jew like Einstein, while the average of its individuals less so (and of more interest to the racist ideologies he opposed). And this is not a metaphor: it is literally what is said in the note. On the contrary, it's a stretch to interpret it as a reference to the individuals in the masses instead of the masses themselves.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• FredPret 3y ago
  From his Isaacson biography, it would appear that he does not have high regard for the mental faculties of the average person. As far as absolute comparisons of intelligence goes, we don't yet have a way to measure it and may never have. The best we can do are relative comparisons like IQ. So he may well be spot-on in his assessment, and we should respect his point of view, because he was clearly very close to the top of the mountain in his (and every) time.
  • mp05 3y ago
    Obviously Einstein was a brilliant man but I've gotten the impression he was "2nd tier" when compared to some of his contemporaries like Poincaré and von Neumann. Confirm/deny?
    • tekla 3y ago
      I don't even understand how its possible to think this. He revolutionized classical physics, made huge advancements in the brand new field of quantum mechanics (unwillingly at first) and made tons of very interesting philosophical works.
      • digging 3y ago
        It could be I am way out of my depth here, but it seems to me someone like Von Neumann was certainly above Einstein. Von Neumann was an S-tier intellect, truly astonishing. I don't know enough about Einstein to say whether or not he was also an S-tier, but I have often heard it said that someone would have figured out the stuff he is most famous for if he hadn't been there. Because others were working on similar math. And I've also read about Von Neumann just solving unsolvable things on whim, inventing new concepts whole cloth that weren't even the focus of his work, etc. Nobody could say Einstein wasn't brilliant, but his being famous doesn't mean he was the most brilliant. For that matter, we should acknowledge that the smartest person to have ever lived might have died without ever touching a pencil, because we still use "being born in the right place" as a proxy for greatness. Should we ever meet the basics needs of everyone and to allow every mind to flourish, we might find our greats are less rare than we thought.
• dougmwne 3y ago
  > … who produce some thing valuable for the community. I think you are cleaning up his values. He clearly seems to be pointing to a few people who produce novel ideas and creations as opposed to the mass of people who never create much of value globally out of their lives. And actually, this statement used to be uncontroversial. Social media and the death of journalism means that our best thinkers no longer have much of a platform. It may be easy to forget and unpopular to remember, but there are some exceptional and brilliant people out there.
  • ekianjo 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • vkou 3y ago
    > And actually, this statement used to be uncontroversial. Indeed. The social value and inherent virtue of kings, high-priests, and robber-barons used to be beyond reproach.
    • lapphi 3y ago
      True but in the context of the quote I don’t think Einstein would have viewed them as people that made valuable contributions to society. Probably would have placed them in the former category, honestly.
    • bugglebeetle 3y ago
      Einstein was a socialist, so this is likely not to whom he was referring. While undoubtedly an elitist, I’m sure he counted the leaders of industry among the dullards and buffoons. You’d honestly have to be pretty dumb yourself to put them on the same level of his peers in science, like, say, Von Neumann, even though that’s very much the order of the day in modern America.
      • 7thaccount 3y ago
        Reading about Von Neuman is pretty crazy and shows how wide the gap is between people who are only highly intelligent and geniuses like he that made contributions to so many fields.
• Swizec 3y ago
  A smart man once said “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” This would’ve been quite obvious to someone fleeing Germany in the 1930’s after seeing what happens when the people are panicked and afraid and a charismatic leader says “I know whose fault this is and I can fix it!”
• kevinventullo 3y ago
  It’s not clear to me that there’s a meaningful distinction. If “the masses” can be manipulated into supporting and even dying for a despicable but charismatic leader, that precisely means a bunch of individuals were so manipulated.
  • cvoss 3y ago
    No, I don't think that's right. A group of people functioning with a sense of group identity behaves very very differently from what each individual member of the group may say or do on their own. Peer pressure and groupthink are powerful phenomena that can override individual character and intelligence.
• t_mann 3y ago
  That's also how I would read it, and I think it's perfectly understandable why someone who was considered a Jew by the Nazis and had to flee from Germany, despite holding a prestigious university chair position and being a scientist of the highest international acclaim, would feel that way about the instincts of the masses in 1939, in the days of mass hysteria leading up to or following right up to (depending on when exactly this was written) an unjustified war of aggression against a neighboring country (even without knowing what that war would later turn into). Considering these circumstances, I think his assessment is spot on, and the fact that we look down on this idea nowadays (judging from the fact that this is the top-voted comment at the time of writing) may be evidence of the kind of progress he was hoping for in the last paragraph.
• politelemon 3y ago
  The multiple interpretations of that passage now has me actually wondering, in how many other ways it'll be interpreted by the 6900s!
• gfody 3y ago
  "none of us is as dumb as all of us"
  • kulahan 3y ago
    I was thinking "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals." (I think that's how it goes...) but this one is great too lol.
    • sidlls 3y ago
      This has never made any sense to me. "People are dumb, panicky animals" because "people" is made up of "persons" who (in aggregate) dumb stuff down. The individuals in the "people" are also "dumb, panicky animals," generally speaking.
      • kulahan 3y ago
        It's just speaking to the idea of pack mentality. It's ingrained in us to go with the flow because we're a social species. So, if someone else makes a mistake, it's not nearly as bad if we make a mistake as well. On the flip-side, if you're the only person around, you can't rely on anyone else and it forces you to think about things. It's not always true of course; just a colloquialism.
• openquery 3y ago
  Let's finish the quote. > the intelligence & character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce some thing valuable for the community. It doesn't strike me as crazy that a guy who was hanging out with Gödel and von Neumann all day [0] might think this way. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Resident_scholar_at_the_Institute_for_Advanced_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Resident_schol...
  • modzu 3y ago
    if you want to finish the quote it should also be taken in context. the quote is an answer to the question of why people go to war and kill each other
  • adventured 3y ago
    People are overly charitable with Einstein because they view him as more grandfatherly and less of an asshole than most of the classic super genius types of history. That's based almost entirely on his image, which has been well sheltered, and his literal image (how he comes across in old black & white photos; oh look, golly, that's soooo cute, he has his tongue sticking out! look at that hair!). Back in reality, Einstein likely had an ego the size of a large galaxy, like all the rest. I don't know that I've ever read about someone being similarly famous and them not having an unhealthy outsized ego. The fame always wins. The masses are very commonly wrong about their adored historical figures though. Gandhi was exceptionally vile in his beliefs. Mother Teresa was a sadist that clearly enjoyed torturing people that had AIDS. FDR was a racist that put Japanese Americans in camps. Che was a sociopathic extreme homophobe and mass murderer. Napoleon was one of the great genocidal maniacs of history, almost on par with Hitler in the death and destruction he caused in attempted conquering. Bill Cosby, well, you know. And on it goes forever.
    • _gabe_ 3y ago
      Perhaps you’re being a bit too uncharitable to overcompensate? I’ve never heard of this, and the only sources I can find for the claim you made about mother Teresa make claims that the organization that mother Teresa started would refuse patients pain medication out of misguided notions. I’m curious what specifically you’re referring to here. And as for: > FDR was a racist that put Japanese Americans in camps I wouldn’t go so far to say that FDR was racist for doing this. America was literally bombed and dragged into a war, and other countries were also placing civilians in internment camps. From Wikipedia: >> Japan interned 130,000 Dutch, British, and American civilians in Asia during World War II. Does this mean the Japanese were racist? No. This was world war, and countries were doing this as a source of leverage. I don’t know about the rest of your examples, but I feel like you may be being a bit uncharitable in your characterization of these circumstances. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_internee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_internee
• dalbasal 3y ago
  Well said. Our 21st century version, at least to me, is even harder to phrase... at least currently. I thought connecting everyone, all opinions, minds, ideas... I thought it would be good. It was, at first. There were ways for the better ideas to float. Ways for ideas to cross-pollinate. The "society" seemed like a greater intelligence, one that I got a lot from. Now... It's worse than I could have ever imagined. It's like every person makes the whole a little meaner, dumber, weaker of heart... The whole makes the individual a little worse.
  • boringg 3y ago
    Oh yeah I unfortunately agree with you here. The ability to aggregate power around fringe ideas and bully other people into submission has truly allowed for a much less enlightened world - prime example is look how bareknuckle politics is around the world now. The strategy that you can isolate one person from the herd with your online gang is deeply concerning for the future of reasonable discourse.
    • dalbasal 3y ago
      That and many other dynamics. Bullying is one. A lot is just dumbing down. Reduction to meme. Thinking by affiliation. Picking sides. Factionalism. Populism. Statements have scores. Followers. Upvotes. Retweets. Everyone is gaming some sort of algorithm. All the problems of politics, now permeating all of society. We think, often, how and as we speak.. as we debate. Now that the conversation, the debate has become.. what it is, I think it really does affect how and what we think. That (garbage) mode of debating is now a major mode of thinking. It's a mess.
      • boringg 3y ago
        100%
• wubrr 3y ago
  I think 'intelligence and character' in this context, can be interpreted as the knowledge of and ability to control world events. All of the wars are started by the 'in the know' few that have their own goals, have power, influence, access to information, etc. But the people that actually fall for the war propaganda and sign up to fight and die (or cheer it on from the sidelines) are largely entirely excluded from having any influence over the decision to start a war, and unaware of the machinations that go on behind the scenes. If we didn't have 'stupid' people willing to die for the goals of a few psychopathic parasites, I'm sure we'd have a lot few wars/conflicts.
• euroderf 3y ago
  "the masses" => "masses"
• wnc3141 3y ago
  In this context I agree, - I read it as him lamenting the intelligence of those who participate in, and perpetuate the conditions of the Drepression (and global economic collapse) in addition to the tendency to descend into mass violence (as he witnessed in the WWI and beginning again in Europe).
• eevilspock 3y ago
  I think how you interpret that line is related to how you interpret > However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle It is possible to give both an Ayn Randian interpretation. But then: Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ I doubt Einstein would accept an invitation to Galt's Gulch.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  He had to leave his home and relocate to the US, because masses of stupid people suddenly decided that Jews are root of all evils. His words reflect exactly that sentiment. Unfortunately, 80 years on, there are still masses of people upholding the same belief.
• svnt 3y ago
  It was a very different educational reality back then. High school education was not at all common until the 20th century. That means most of Einstein’s contemporaries, the masses, would have had between a 50-80% chance of a haphazard middle school level education. [0] Contrast this with his peers in the sciences who were extremely well educated and an early generation if not the first generation of globally-connected world-class minds and there is no ambiguity about what he is saying. [0] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf
• oooyay 3y ago
  imo, I think it's a bit of both. > Further more, people living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason any one who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. It sounds like he's speaking to the common intervals of war during his lifetime. From 1879-1955 Einstein would have been alive for roughly 27 wars that involved the US and there's probably a multiplicative factor there for international conflicts and wars. > This is due to the fact that the intelligence and character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce some thing valuable for the community. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority. The way I read this is that people are inevitably who vote for war. It's similar to the attitude prevalent in the song "Forever Young" by Alphaville: Can you imagine how we won the war? Little fascist lady she loves you so Following her leader, she's getting in tune The music's played by the madmen which became Can you imagine when this race is won Turn our golden faces into the sun Praising our leaders we're getting in tune The music's played by the madmen I reason about that as juxtaposed to his comments on his contribution to the atomic bomb: > “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger.” (1947)
• NoToP 3y ago
  War is waged by individuals. We call it "fighting" or "assault".
• mseepgood 3y ago
  > War isn't waged by individuals (or even groups of exclusively idiots and villains). Although it is usually individuals who decide whether to start a war or not.
• mmh0000 3y ago
  In the immortal words of Agent K "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."
  • thechao 3y ago
    To paraphrase Terry Pratchett's version of this: "the intelligence of a group of people is the intelligence of the stupidest member of the group, divided by the number of people in the group".
• low_tech_love 3y ago
  It’s interesting that 10 years later he would write a defense of socialism; maybe in his mind both things could exist together (socialism and independent thought) or maybe he changed his mind…? http://www.exponentialimprovement.com/cms/uploads/Einstein%20on%20Why%20Socialism.pdf http://www.exponentialimprovement.com/cms/uploads/Einstein%2...
• huytersd 3y ago
  Oh no. He was definitely saying this https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE?si=EwhkQ-gju2aw97z_ https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE?si=EwhkQ-gju2aw97z_