People naturally assume that if they’d lived under the Third Reich, they would have resisted, sabotaged, or subverted Nazi activities. Easy to say when the enemy is a reductionist caricature of evil incarnate.

It becomes fraught with ambiguity when its your friends, family, colleagues, & neighbors who become the passive cogs in an impersonal machine of sanitized massacre.

There’s no magic spell that’s cast to give courage or integrity or a spirit of sacrifice. Character isn’t a gift that arrives “when the time is right” at the door of those too weak to act on their conscience.

Good guys become the stuff of legends & lore because they are so rare. We convince ourselves in the abstract that in exceptional circumstances paragons of virtue will suddenly appear to save the day. But the good guys aren’t paragons of virtue & they don’t materialize ex nihilo.

It isn’t “rational” to be a good guy. Everything is risked - comforts, companionship, future, life itself. Outnumbered & outflanked, in defeat your legacy is that of the villain, or worse, your deeds are forgotten altogether. No rational person would choose it at such a price.

But irrationalism isn’t an absence of clarity. In the irrationalism of the few, there’s a clarity of vision the heart alone possesses. Irrationalism is the driver of every historical overcoming of impossible odds. It produces humanity’s greatest follies & it’s greatest triumphs.

Just thinking about that this morning. And now, onto more pressing matters.

/fin