In yesterday’s post, I wrote about Mario Livio’s brief depiction of Freud in his book, “Brilliant Blunders”. While Livio devoted considerably more time and space (play on words intended) on Einstein’s scientific blunders, for me, his most significant observation about Einstein had nothing to do with science; it had more to do with psychology.  According to Livio, and by his own admission, Einstein knew he had blundered badly when he gave President Roosevelt his recommendation to build the atom bomb.  Einstein rationalized his decision by thinking that he had to it so that the Germans wouldn’t do it first; but the probability was high that Einstein had nothing to worry about.  Had he considered the character structure of demagogues like Hitler, he would have realized that one of their tragic flaws is rigidity of thinking, an inflexibility in responding to input from their subordinates that doesn’t conform to their obsessional agenda. The irony, of course, was that Hitler’s single-minded focus on ‘the final solution’ kept him from the distraction of a peripheral plan to create an atomic bomb, which very likely saved the world.