#if the madame web video recommended did come from you commas

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Okay so I just finished watching Outside Xtra's video on Madame Web (which I think I saw as a recommendation in tags by @a-commas-a-pause ?) and they quickly touched on the whole "is it okay to kill a child if you know that child will grow up to do horrific things?" and because I'm me, I have Thoughts™ and Opinions™ on that.

The version of this I've come across most often and I assume most other people have come across is "If you could, would you kill a baby who grows up to be Adolf Hitler?" , which

Anyway, I think this question - and other questions like it - is incredibly stupid and incredibly pointless.

Because the question either fundamentally misunderstands Nazi Germany or it's a badly worded question trying to get at the nature of punitive justice.

If it's the latter, you could just ask "is it ethical to punish someone for crimes they will commit in the future?" instead so presumably it's the former that is intended.

Which, the former is operating on the logic that removing Hitler from the equation would have just stopped Nazi Germany from happening, and the logic has no basis in reality. If it wasn't Hitler, it would have been someone else. It might have played out differently, but Hitler wasn't the sole reason that Nazis were able to take control of Germany.

This sort of question means to ask "Is it moral to kill a child to stop that child from committing atrocities in the future?"

And applying that questions to historical figures is almost entirely useless.

It is very rare that a monumental event in history occurred due to the efforts of a single individual; it's simply that the faces of these events are the ones whose names we remember.

As such, it is also very rare that you can trace a domino trail from said historical event to a singular point of origin. Hitler being rejected from art school is not the first in a domino train that ends in the Holocaust.

I think about this way more than I should realistically, but I just think the attitude we have really highlights the way we approach history, and the knock-on effects from that.

For one, it's incredibly individualistic; very Ayn Rand. It assumes that history is made not by the people, but by one singular person. It discourages working together toward a goal and encourages competition instead.

But it also betrays a level of complacency, in my opinion. As I've pointed out above, the idea of history hinging entirely on one man is a very flawed idea. In 99% of cases, it's not possible, and yet you are expected to believe otherwise. And so where do you begin an impossible task?

You don't. You think "I'm one person, I can't change the world" and so you give up, you become complacent, but you give up believing that some person can do it, just not you. And so any guilt or shame you're feeling can easily be pushed aside. It was okay that you did nothing because nothing you did would have amounted to anything because you're not The Chosen One.

It's easier to imagine history as lots of different domino trains running parallel to each other, and easier to imagine history as what Those Important People™ do while ordinary folks do nothing, because it allows you to be complacent.

And I guess that's the conclusion because all of this has just been written off the top of my head, and I actually have plans today that I need to prepare for.