According to wise, old Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard once said, “Beauty and folly are old companions,” and several examples leap to mind, specifically Charles Atlas, Adolph Hitler, and Congress.  Most everyone’s familiar with Atlas through his back-of-the-comic-book ads featuring a 97-pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face by a bully at a beach that includes a photo of Atlas in his prime wearing a speedo and flexing.  The ads, considered among the longest-running and most successful of all time, offered the same muscles to anyone willing to buy his Dynamic Tension course of exercises that he claimed he learned from watching lions at the zoo.  His Wikipedia article states that, in fact, “none of the exercises in the Dynamic Tension course could be attributed to how lions use their bodies.”  In another fact, Atlas’ real name was Angelo Siciliano.  He changed his name, developed Dynamic Tension, and became a body building star after Bernarr Macfadden discovered him in 1921, when he was 29.  According to “The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden,” an American Heritage Magazine article by Ben Yagoda, Macfadden is better known as the “Father of the Confession Magazine,” but in 1922 Macfadden got Siciliano to change his name to Atlas and immediately used his powerful publicity machine to dubb him “America’s Most Handsome Man” and “America’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.”  A pure product of Macfadden’s fevered imagination, Atlas never actually won a real title, and one of Macfadden’s flack writers “helped” Atlas write his training course and  autobiography.

You can’t trust anything about Macfadden’s background prior to his 25^th birthday in 1896, since he’s the only source and extremely unreliable.  His last 62 years are better documented, but as Yagoda noted, “the single most important force in that life was a restless desire for publicity.”  His “other passion was for his ideas.  They had to do with the titanic benefits of exercise, the right foods, periodic fasts, and the extreme perils of, among other things, corsets, white bread, doctors, vaccination, overeating, and prudery.”  He founded Physical Culture Magazine (featuring photos of scantily clad models) in 1899, published a 2,969-page “Encyclopedia of Physical Culture” in 1911, and opened a string of cheap Physical Culture restaurants (“with menus strikingly similar to today’s bean sprout emporiums”).  Macfadden also “established a succession of spas he called ‘healthatoriums’.”  The one he started in Battle Creek, Michigan, espousing his “milk cure” for cancer, led to “a sanitarium war with the cereal kings Charles W. Post and the Kellogg brothers.”  Macfadden excelled at irritating people, and Yagoda goes into great and amusing detail about that, but he admitted that “Macfadden turned out to be a crackerjack businessman” when he began publishing “True Story” magazine in 1919.  “Basically, the True Story formula consisted of first-person accounts, written in an untutored but clear style, of sin and redemption.  The sin, usually carnal, was described in some detail, but the actual consummation nearly always seemed to take place between paragraphs, and it was invariably dressed up in a moral lesson.”  He soon added “True Love, True Romance, True Detective Mysteries, and others that proved quite popular.  By the late 1920s he was worth $30 million but died poor and alone in his 80s, yet Macfadden Publications persists and still sells 2,500,000 confession magazines annually.

Dr. Mike Mew, a British dentist, was equally sure that human beauty is paramount, but he’s been far less successful at convincing others, according to “There’s No Excuse for Ugly People,” a Guardian article by Jenny Kleeman.  Mew’s the world’s leading proponent of “mewing,” described by his “Ultimate Mewing Guide” as “the postural technique that involves lodging your tongue in the roof of your mouth for hours on end to ‘align the teeth, accentuate your cheekbones, sharpen your jawline, and even straighten your nose’.”  Mewing has become yet another TikTok fad, and Mew does possess “a remarkable jaw.  It is a lantern jaw, wide and square, framed by sinuous, muscular chops.”  That’s thanks to his father, also a dentist and the originator of “orthotropics,” AKA mewing, “who made him wear a bespoke palate-expanding device throughout his childhood.”  He remains firm in supporting his dad’s theories, but putting them into practice led to Mew’s losing his dental license.  If only Mew had been born a generation earlier and in Germany, he’d have been a star, like Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician.  In 1939 Hitler tasked Brandt and Philipp Bouhler, the director of his private chancellery, to establish a “secret killing operation targeting disabled children.”  That program is described in horrifying detail in a publication from a United States Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia article, “T-4 Program to Murder People with Disabilities.”

 Hitler’s “Chancellery was compact and separate from state, government, or Nazi Party apparatuses” for he wanted no interference from Germany’s legislative or judicial branches.  That’s why “Hitler chose it to serve as the engine for the ‘euthanasia’ campaign.”  The codename “T-4” referred to the address for the secret offices coordinating the euthanasia: Tiergartenstrasse 4.  “Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria. In reality, the clinics were children’s killing wards. There, specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation.”  Hitler proactively pardoned all medical personnel involved.  They started with infants, then included youths up to 17, and then added institutionalized adults.  The second phase of Brandt’s and Bouhler’s plan led to murdering a wider range, “including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers,” and they expanded it to kill anyone who didn’t fit into the Nazi’s dream of “a racially pure and productive society” and deemed them “life unworthy of life.”  That was the third, and “Final Solution” that lasted until the very end of WWII

How could anyone endorse this sort of inhumanity?  That requires a little agnoiology, the study of ignorance, as in “Cognitive Dissonance Explained,” an article from the Bay Area Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Center.   “Cognitive dissonance happens when we experience mental discomfort from holding conflicting beliefs.  Common triggers of cognitive dissonance include decision-making, social pressures, and exposure to new information, which can prompt significant internal conflict and emotional distress.  To reduce cognitive dissonance, individuals often rationalize behaviors, alter their beliefs, or change actions …. The key takeaway is that the more cognitive dissonance we experience, the greater the pressure to reduce it. And we have two options for dissonance reduction: we can either change our behavior or change our belief.

Instead of refusing to perform their grisly tasks, hundreds of thousands of German medical practitioners, SS troops, and prison guards chose to change their beliefs about the sanctity of human life.  They engaged in willful ignorance, refusing to admit to themselves the horrors they perpetrated.  Some might have been simply stupid.  According to Langeek.com (“a language platform that makes your learning process faster and easier”), “Ignorance and stupidity both refer to doing something or believing in something idiotic.  However, ‘ignorance’ means not having the proper knowledge …. ‘Stupidity’ is when someone is not intelligent enough to grasp a concept.”  Nonetheless, Brandt, Bouhler, and Hitler’s other minions weren’t stupid; they were willfully, consciously evil, acting against the very fibers of human decency.   “Willful ignorance occurs when someone intentionally avoids information about the negative consequences of their actions,” according to “40% of People Willfully Choose to Be Ignorant. Here’s why,” a Bigthink.com article that says “A new meta-analysis found that 40% of people will choose to remain ignorant of how their decisions affect others. The evidence suggests that willful ignorance provides people with a built-in excuse to act selfishly.”  For example, participants in a Yale study were randomly assigned the roles of decision-maker” or “recipient.” Decision-makers were given a choice to take either a $5 or $6 payout and were told that “If they take the $5 payout, the recipient will receive $5 as well. If they take the $6 payout, the recipient will receive $1,” and “only about a quarter of decision-makers acted selfishly.”  When the decision-makers weren’t told what the recipient would receive, but could have inquired about that, “44% of decision-makers in the experimental condition chose to remain willfully ignorant and took the selfish option” without asking.

This explains many disturbing things happening now in our country, like Congress passing legislation they call “beautiful designed to make a few wealthy people far richer while devasting the lives of many millions of the rest of us.  As another wise man, Isaac Asimov, said “Your assumptions are your windows on the world.  Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”