Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, have you ever thought about how much you actually matter? I mean, really matter? Not in some cheesy, inspirational poster kind of way, but like, in a real, tangible, scientific kinda way. It's kinda crazy, right?
Because, honestly, we’re all changing the world, like, all the time. Seriously. Just by listening to me ramble on right now, your brain's doing this whole little dance, adjusting, you know? And if you hadn't heard this stuff, the world would be, like, slightly different. I know, it sounds out there, but your brain cells, your neural networks, they're getting tweaked, and that's gonna affect how you act, even in the tiniest ways, for the rest of your life. And who knows what kinda ripple effect that'll have? In a world that's all connected, everything kinda matters.
Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, that sounds kinda small, like, no big deal," right? But think about this: you, or maybe you already have, might decide to have kids. And the exact, precise moment a baby, you know, comes to be? It's, like, one of the most random things in the universe. Change anything, like anything at all, on that day, and you could end up with a completely different child. I mean, a daughter instead of a son, or just a different version of that son or daughter. Siblings are already, like, wildly different sometimes. So any change in who's born is gonna change everything.
And it's not just that one day, it's every single moment, every tiny detail of your life, had to be exactly as it was for you to exist. That’s true for everyone.
Those motivational posters say, "You're one in a million!" But it's more like one in a hundred million, because that's how many little swimmers you outraced to even be here.
You matter. It's not just, like, self-help mumbo jumbo, it's, like, actual science. If someone else had been born instead of you, someone you beat out in the race for existence, countless other people's lives would be totally different, and so would the whole world. The ripples of our lives, they just keep going and going.
It's kind of an awesome thought, right? But sometimes, in today's world, we feel like we're just cogs, you know? Just easily replaceable parts in some giant machine. Big corporations, call centers instead of local stores... it makes us feel interchangeable, like robots. Humans start to feel like robots who just eat. It kinda sucks the humanity out of everything, doesn’t it? It doesn't matter who turns the crank, as long as it gets turned.
But what if that whole way of thinking is, like, totally wrong?
So, let’s think about this. There are, like, two different ways of looking at history. One way is that change is all planned out, like a storybook. Individuals come and go, but the bigger picture, the trends, they're what really matter. Where do trends come from? No one really says, just that it’s all heading towards this one outcome. So, history is written by these unseen forces, and we're basically just along for the ride, kinda powerless to change things.
The other way of looking at it is that people, individuals, are what make history. The things one person does can send things down a completely different path. If you believe in chaos theory, even the smallest action or even thought can change the whole world. The "who" is as important as the "what." It's not just that everything you do matters, it's that *you* are the one doing it. Maybe we all have our own little butterfly effect, because we all flap our wings a little bit differently, you know?
So, which one is it? Are we just passengers, or are we the ones driving the bus?
There was this poll in the New York Times Magazine, asking people if they could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would they? Forget about all the, you know, time travel paradoxes. Just answer the question. For some people, it's an easy decision, you know, the good outweighs the bad. Others think it's wrong to kill an innocent baby, no matter what he *might* do later. Turns out, it was pretty evenly split.
But the question is deeper than it seems. What you answer kinda depends on how you think history works. If small changes can have huge consequences, then messing with the past is a huge risk.
The whole idea behind the question assumes that without Hitler, the Nazis wouldn't have come to power, World War II wouldn't have happened, all that stuff. It assumes Hitler was the cause. But some historians would say that those things were bound to happen anyway, that Hitler might have changed a few details, but not the bigger picture. The war, the Nazis, the Holocaust, those were because of bigger things than just one guy.
Even if you agree that killing Hitler would have changed history, you also have to think about if it would have changed it for the better. Some people think it could have been even worse. Someone even wrote a book about it where Hitler's dad is infertile, and an even *more* rational Nazi leader takes over, ends up getting nukes, winning the war, and killing even more people. We can’t really know what would happen. Changing the past is, like, super complicated. The baby Hitler question is about whether or not deleting one individual would actually change the story of our species.
Some historians even think these kinds of hypothetical questions are dumb and pointless. One called them “unhistorical sh*t.” It might be true that you can’t change the past, but thinking about other possibilities can help you understand why things happened the way they did.
For ages, everyone thought that important people were the ones who made history. All those old books were about kings and emperors. In China, they thought the rulers were chosen by heaven. One philosopher even said that history was just the story of great men. But even then, it didn't really matter *who* the Great Man was, because they were just doing what God wanted them to do.
Over time, this Great Man idea changed. It wasn't so much about God anymore, but about powerful people shaping things. To understand a war, you studied the leaders, not the reasons behind the war. Leaders shape outcomes, and their personalities, their quirks, can change everything. If someone else had replaced Steve Jobs, our world would be different. In this version of history, individuals are not interchangeable. People in key moments, they matter.
But then, some historians pushed back against the Great Man Theory. They said that leaders were just products of their time, that history shaped them, not the other way around. Some thought that history was all heading towards a set goal, no matter who was in charge.
And then came this new way of thinking about history that looked at long-term trends instead of individuals. One of these historians even ended up getting tortured and killed by the Nazis. He believed his death was because of these social trends, not just Hitler.
Instead of focusing on the big shots, some historians started looking at how the lives of regular people changed things. Modern historians are, like, snobby about anyone who still believes in the Great Man Theory, as if it’s the dumber version of history.
People in political science and economics often think individuals don't really matter either. They think people will do whatever they can get away with and don't care about who someone actually is.
Here’s this cool thought experiment. Imagine putting one flea on a checkerboard. You can predict where that flea will jump pretty easily. Now, add a bunch more fleas, each with a name tag. You can’t predict exactly where one flea will be, but you can predict how they’ll all act in general.
But what if one of those fleas is a cannibal? Suddenly, all those predictions are useless. The fleas will run from the cannibal. Or what if each flea is a little weird? One jumps off the board, another won’t move, another likes the corners. Suddenly, where they started matters a lot. Every time you try the experiment, it’s different.
But when we study humans, who are way more complicated than fleas, we act like the people don't matter. Some political scientists don't even want to think about what a president is *like*, just the presidency as an institution. They think that's for TV, not for serious research. The whole idea is that real history comes from these social institutions, not from people.
But the thing is, I've studied power and those who hold it for a while now, and that's never made sense. Sure, the presidency matters, but so does the president. The Cuban Missile Crisis might have been different if Kennedy or Khrushchev had just been in a bad mood. But a lot of people who study the presidency don't think about that. Then Trump came along, and suddenly everyone realized that one guy *can* change history. Does anyone actually think America would be the same today if Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton had won?
Even the people around powerful people can matter. To know why the North won the Civil War, a lot of people would say the North had more stuff. But the war could have gone differently. A few small changes, and the Confederacy might have won. Turns out, one of the reasons it didn’t happen was because of three discarded cigars.
A soldier found an order from the Confederate Army, they were planning a surprise attack. But was it real? It was brought to a general who gave it to his adjutant. The adjutant knew the signature on the order. Before the war, he worked at a bank where the guy who signed the order used to sign checks. The general knew the order was real.
The Union Army went to fight the Confederates. The ensuing Battle of Antietam was the bloodiest day in American history, and forced the Confederates to retreat, reversing the momentum of the war. Historians suggest the battle’s outcome also gave President Lincoln the confidence to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
All this because of three lost cigars, a guy resting in the shade, and a guy who recognized a signature. We usually leave those kinds of things out of history, and look for more, you know, logical explanations.
We like to think that the message matters more than the messenger. But that's not always the case.
There's this Greek myth about Cassandra. Apollo gave her the power to see the future, but when she turned him down, he cursed her so no one would believe her. She could warn people about wars and deaths, but no one would listen.
We take shortcuts. We use cues and categories to quickly figure people out. Experts don't wear Hawaiian shirts on TV. We judge people by their job, their education, their neighborhood. "What do you do?" tells us everything we need to know. If someone says they're an "entrepreneur" or an "influencer," that changes how we think about them, even if it's the same person. But those words change, too. Our mental maps shift all the time. So who says something, and how we see them, can change whether we trust them or not.
Our brains are designed to quickly put people into boxes and decide if we should listen to them. We get it wrong all the time. Plenty of people in suits and with fancy degrees have messed things up big time.
We often call that the Cassandra problem. It’s just another way of thinking about how people’s biases can change history.
Even Abraham Lincoln ignored a warning that he was in danger. A clairvoyant told him his life was at risk, but Lincoln didn't believe in spiritualism. Turns out, the clairvoyant was connected to John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln ignored the warning and ended up getting killed.
Good ideas that work will eventually win out. We often come up with similar ideas at the same time. But even then, the person who has the idea matters.
Two science philosophers, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, argued about how science works. Popper thought scientists tried to tear down bad ideas. Kuhn said scientists have biases. Scientists believe in certain ideas, and they try to prove they're right. When scientists are wrong, things can fall apart. He calls those "revolutions" in science.
To Kuhn, scientists matter. They choose which questions to ask, which ideas to consider, who gets money. Science can be messy because humans are doing it.
A German guy named Alfred Wegener proposed that continents could drift, but people didn't believe him. He was a meteorologist, not a geologist. People misunderstood because of who was saying it, not what he was saying. It took fifty years for his idea to be accepted.
It’s not just me who thinks individual scientists matter. But people always bring up Charles Darwin. Wouldn't someone else have come up with evolution if Darwin hadn't?
Someone did. Alfred Russel Wallace proposed evolution around the same time as Darwin. People use this to say that it doesn't matter if it was Darwin or Wallace. Science would have just kept going.
The most important book of the 19th century almost didn’t get written.
The captain of the HMS Beagle killed himself. So a new captain, Robert FitzRoy, took over and wanted someone to talk to on the voyage, but Darwin's nose looked like he wasn't determined enough. Darwin was almost left behind because of his nose.
Darwin came back with all these new ideas but didn't publish them right away.
Then Wallace sent Darwin a letter with a similar idea about natural selection. Darwin rushed to publish *On the Origin of Species*. The guy who reviewed the book thought Darwin should write about pigeons instead. But Darwin didn't listen, and published his book.
This story is used to say that science is just bound to happen, it doesn't matter who does it. Even if Darwin's nose had kept him off the ship, Wallace would have done it instead. It only matters who gets the credit.
But here’s the thing. Wallace was an outsider, so scientists wouldn't have taken him seriously. Also, Wallace swore by phrenology, the idea that you can read people's skulls. He thought mediums could conjure flowers out of thin air. People made fun of him for it.
Today, everyone accepts Darwin's ideas. But back then, they were controversial. Even now, a lot of people don't believe in evolution. How would it have gone if the main guy behind evolution also believed in ghosts and magic?
Evolution would have won out eventually, but it would have taken longer. And because everything is connected, that delay would have changed everything else. Darwin's cousin used his ideas to start eugenics. Would he have done that if Wallace, not his cousin, had come up with evolution? We don't know. But the same idea proposed by someone else can have different results. Who discovers something can depend on something random, like the shape of their nose. No part of our world can escape contingency. What you do matters. But it also matters that it's *you* who's doing it.
The captain who hired Darwin because he was lonely went on to develop meteorology and came up with the word "forecast."
But FitzRoy wasn't happy. He felt guilty about Darwin's ideas. He killed himself, just like the captain before him. He took his life two weeks after Abraham Lincoln was killed after ignoring a warning from a clairvoyant.
We’re back to flukes and randomness. When matters, too. If a baby is born a bit earlier or later, it can completely alter their lives, how their born, based on even the smallest tweaks in our behavior. The philosophical implications are mind-bending.