How Bad Things Are Alike

I was reading The Halo Effect tonight, an excellent (so far anyway) book on business and how people perceive it. There was a quote from George Orwell's 1945 essay on nationalism, and that in turn made something click for me. Orwell was discussing some of the similarities among nationalists (after a definition that to my mind really suggest idealists more than nationalists). I remembered an old medical rule that applies. One way you can tell that a child has a genetic syndrome (Down's, for instance) is that the child bears more of a resemblance to other children with the syndrome than to siblings and other relatives. Just so with extreme thinking and the societies it produces. Stalin's Russia bore a strong resemblance to Hitler's Germany, a stronger resemblance than to other Eastern European countries of the time.

There are several such rules and axioms of medicine I use quite often. My favorite is from diagnostics: If you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. I've often used that one to stop myself from going down some convoluted and exotic path of investigation of a computer problem when in fact the solution was pretty much: Is it plugged in? Well, no. Well, plug it in!

In a Kindle moment, it was really neat to be able to read the Orwell quote, then pop it in search and find the essay in another spot on the Kindle, read the essay, and then come back to the Halo Effect.