Hitler no longer exists. We do, and we have to confront the reality that people like Hitler still find their way into civic office where they can seize power and bring ruin to us all.
It’s not a good thing for us to imagine a divine justice that balances out the evil wrought by persons past. It may be a brief comfort to suggest that Hitler burns in Hellfire, that Mengele, after living a long life as a fugitive, died a free man, that Heydrich’s torment didn’t end with his dying battle against sepsis, but in the end we have to come to terms that nature is unjust and if we want a world in which good folk thrive and wicked folk fail to survive, this is a society and an institution we’ll have to create ourselves, from scratch.
And so far, we suck at it.
Better yet, ultimately we should recognize that people who make poor life choices are still surviving the best they could. In a working society, Hitlers and Trumps would not rise to power, and Heydrichs and Himmlers would not be able to exploit the biases of the system to elevate themselves to aristocracy-adjacent positions. In a working society, the only thing to gain with civic power would be the satisfaction of the fulfillment of one’s duty to society… and that one gets to direct the movement of mountains and the construction of bridges for the betterment of all the community.
It’s boring, but personally I’d rather constrain wars and torture and genocide to the confines of fiction. Make sports news, whether tragic or glorious, great again.
Hitler no longer exists. We do, and we have to confront the reality that people like Hitler still find their way into civic office where they can seize power and bring ruin to us all.
It’s not a good thing for us to imagine a divine justice that balances out the evil wrought by persons past. It may be a brief comfort to suggest that Hitler burns in Hellfire, that Mengele, after living a long life as a fugitive, died a free man, that Heydrich’s torment didn’t end with his dying battle against sepsis, but in the end we have to come to terms that nature is unjust and if we want a world in which good folk thrive and wicked folk fail to survive, this is a society and an institution we’ll have to create ourselves, from scratch.
And so far, we suck at it.
Better yet, ultimately we should recognize that people who make poor life choices are still surviving the best they could. In a working society, Hitlers and Trumps would not rise to power, and Heydrichs and Himmlers would not be able to exploit the biases of the system to elevate themselves to aristocracy-adjacent positions. In a working society, the only thing to gain with civic power would be the satisfaction of the fulfillment of one’s duty to society… and that one gets to direct the movement of mountains and the construction of bridges for the betterment of all the community.
It’s boring, but personally I’d rather constrain wars and torture and genocide to the confines of fiction. Make sports news, whether tragic or glorious, great again.
In other words, there is no justice. There’s just us.
It’s up to us to make justice a real thing, because there are no cosmic forces that will do it for us.