🎵 ♪ Hitler has only got one ball ♫

Today’s news that scientists have analysed Adolf Hitler’s DNA is both fascinating and unsettling. The findings suggest he may have had a genetic disorder, Kallmann syndrome, affecting sexual development, and that rumours of Jewish ancestry were unfounded. But Foucault would argue the real story isn’t about Hitler’s biology. It’s about what it reveals about us.

Every age finds its own way to explain evil. In the past, it was sin for the Church, crime for the courts, and now, in our scientific age, it is pathology. When we test the blood of a dictator, we are no longer asking what he did, but what made him do it. We are searching for a medical cause behind moral catastrophe. This is what Foucault called biopower: the quiet extension of scientific authority into every part of life, even into death. It reassures us that horror has a code, that wickedness can be mapped, that history can be sterilised by science.

The danger, he would say, is that we start to turn ideology into chemistry and choice into disorder. The question “What kind of man was he?” becomes “What kind of genome did he have?” The horror of decision, of human will and responsibility, dissolves into a tidy biological story. Foucault warned that when we medicalise evil, we make it understandable, and therefore, dangerously normal.

He would also notice the spectacle around it. The documentaries, the lab reports, the headlines about Hitler’s DNA; this is not just science, it is theatre. It belongs to what Foucault called a “regime of truth”: the web of institutions and experts that decide what counts as knowledge. The scientist now performs the role of priest and the public, the role of the congregation. Through these rituals, society affirms its belief that knowledge redeems, that the right data can purify the past.

But this kind of power works by silence, not domination. The DNA test explains without understanding. Hitler’s evil was not genetic; it was human, political, and collective. The search for a biological cause tells us less about him than it does about our need to make horror manageable. It highlights the human need to frame moral failure as a medical flaw. Foucault would see this as the ultimate act of control: to turn even history’s darkest figure into a patient on the slab of modern science.

Practical philosophy invites us to look closer at what this habit reveals about everyday life. The same instinct to diagnose now governs our own moods and minds. Sadness becomes “low serotonin,” worry becomes “anxiety disorder,” distraction becomes “neurodivergence.” Each label brings understanding, but also a subtle discipline; a way of managing the self to fit the categories of a therapeutic age. Foucault would warn that in our rush to explain ourselves medically, we risk forgetting how to live with uncertainty, contradiction, and depth. The Stoics would remind us that discomfort is not disease, and reflection is not pathology. Practical philosophy begins where the lab test ends: with the work of living deliberately, judging wisely, and finding integrity not in diagnosis, but in choice.