With an understanding of how the world has been built comes the knowledge to break it. Humans have the capacity to both rationalize genocide and the technological competence to carry it out. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche used her brother’s philosophical writings—born of a staggering human intellect—to validate a worldview that led to the deaths of six million Jews.27 In this regard, humans are nothing like narwhals. Narwhals do not build gas chambers.
