Late in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, the Dude (Jeff Bridges) corrects Walter (John Goodman), informing him that the three German men threatening to hurt them are nihilists, not Nazis. Walter replies with typical profanity,

Nihilists! **** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least its an ethos. 

Walter was right, and there’s some interesting recent social science research backing him up. As this article in Slate explains, Nazism seems to have spread fastest in those German communities with the greatest concentration of voluntary civic organizations – choral groups, athletic teams, associations of animal breeders, and so on. The stronger the bonds between individuals in a community, the easier it was for one of them to convince others to come along and join the Nazi party. (My own experience playing on a softball team during my year in Germany serves as counter-evidence, but of course this was well into the post-Nazi era and we literally could not even turn a double play, so there was no danger of us ever annexing the Sudetenland. But I digress.)

The point I take from this analysis is simple: social power is not good in and of itself, any more than electricity is. Power is the ability to effect change in the world. The more that power is used to good ends, the better. The more its used to bad ends, the worse. The gasoline that fuels your car when you drive your child to the emergency room is power used well. You can also gas up with the expressed intent to run someone else’s child down. That’s power used poorly.

This point is so simple that I could understand someone questioning why it’s worth bringing up. The answer is that I think we often forget it when we make a standard critique of our contemporary world. As the Slate piece notes, political scientist Robert Putnam’s 1995 book Bowling Alone has been only one of the most prominent attempts to argue that Americans have largely ceased to take part in voluntary civic organizations that build trust, form relationships bigger than circles of friends, and make it easier for people to assemble spontaneously to take on a common problem. That is a shame, if we really are getting worse at building these sorts of attachments. That sounds like a recipe for greater loneliness and isolation. But even if such relationships are good in themselves – and I think they are – they might be used for ill purposes as well as worthy ones.

So the next time you see someone who seems like a total loner – the kind of person who will never join a bowling league – it may seem counter-intuitive, yet it might be right to say, “Well, at least s/he probably isn’t likely to ever become a Nazi.” Nihilists aren’t suited for an ethos.