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And he kept saying that ‘technicians never have an instinct’, entangled as they are in their theories ‘like spiders in their webs’ and ‘incapable of weaving anything else’. He advised them to ‘simplify the problems’ as he himself simplified them to ‘make light of everything that is complicated and doctrinaire’. Īnd he advised his collaborators-and this all the more strongly as they occupied positions of greater responsibility-to take their decisions ‘by pure intuition’ relying ‘on their instinct’, never on bookish knowledge or on a routine which, in difficult cases, often lags behind the requirements of action. ‘It is always outside of technical circles that one meets creative genius’, he said. It is the observation that they kill, in him, the flexibility of mind, the creative imagination, the initiative, the clear vision amid a labyrinth of unforeseen difficulties the faculty of grasping, and of grasping in time-immediately, if possible-the relationship between a new situation and the effective action which must be taken to deal with it in a word, the exact intuition: according to him, the superior form of the intelligence. What irritated him to the point of revolt was the effect that technical training and the handling of precision equipment and statistical data can have, and almost always do have, on man, even the ‘well-trained’ one who specialises in them. A universal spirit, he was at ease in this field as in so many others, and he recognised its place in modern combat. It was not, therefore, the technique itself that put him off. And he concluded that all this conferred ‘only a momentary superiority, and the decision to go to war always depends on men’ rather than on material, however important the latter may be. ‘What is’, he said to Rauschning, ‘the invention that has so far been able to revolutionise the laws of warfare in a lasting way? Each invention is itself followed, almost immediately, by another which neutralises the effects of the previous one’. Even in this particular field of strategy where he, the former corporal, moved with an ease that even geniuses can hardly explain, he was sceptical of specialists and their inventions, and, in the final analysis, relied only on the supra-rational vision of the true leader without, of course, rejecting the use of any invention as it represented an effective means to victory. I mentioned above Adolf Hitler’s interest in modern technology-especially, and for good reason, war tec! This is not to say that the dangers of the mechanisation of life, and especially of excessive specialisation, escaped him.