I. The Question
There is a thought experiment that circulates in dinner parties, university canteens, and the kind of late-night conversations that begin on the third scotch and end with somebody saying something they will spend the next week reconsidering, usually wincing along. Be that as it may, the actual question goes something like this:
If you could go back in time, to any point in history, and find and kill one person cleanly, quietly, and without suffering any personal consequences, who would it be?
The act itself will have consequences, of course. That is rather the point. You are going back to prevent something. To excise a malignancy before it metastasises. To pull, as it were, one thread from the fabric of history and watch the whole wretched tapestry unravel into something suddenly more beautiful, rich, and joyous than whatever tumorous thing this world has turned into.
Who do you choose?
You already know the answer everyone gives. You have probably given it yourself. It requires no deliberation, no moral anguish, no weighing of competing claims. It is like a reflex.
Hitler.
Baby Hitler, if you want to be precise about it, because there is apparently a sub-genre of this thought experiment that requires you to specify whether you would kill the adult monster or the infant in the pram, as though the ethics of the thing hinge meaningfully on whether your victim has teeth. Or hair (on the scalp or the upper lip is immaterial). But Hitler, regardless of age. Always Hitler. Unanimously, reflexively, undoubtedly Hitler.
And that comfort is exactly what I want to talk about.
Because this question masquerades as a moral thought experiment. Like a genuine philosophical provocation designed to make you examine your convictions about violence, causation, and the nature of evil. But it is not really any of those things. It is a loyalty test. A cultural password. The correct answer has been agreed upon in advance, and everyone who gives it receives, in return, the warm sensation of being on the right side. Of being, without having had to do very much, either now or in the future. Because you see, you have killed Baby Hitler, even if only in a fantasy. You are now a good person.
I want to suggest that this comfort is worth examining. Not because Hitler was anything other than what we know him to have been. He was, as far as I can determine, uniquely and completely evil, a man without a single redemptive feature that withstands scrutiny, and I want to be absolutely clear about that before I say anything else. This essay is not a rehabilitation. It is not a provocation for its own sake. It is not the intellectual equivalent of wearing a T-shirt to annoy people. That is what a teenager would do. And this essay, if anything, is about the exact opposite.
The question assumes that we know, with confidence, who the singular worst person in history was. And that assumption, I want to argue, is doing an enormous amount of work that we have never asked it to justify.
So. Who do you kill?
I’d like us to think a bit about that.
II. The Compass Breaks
For roughly 40 years, let us say from the start of my teens, when opinions begin to harden into something resembling conviction, to the age of 53 (where I stand today), when convictions begin to harden into something resembling furniture, I have always known which side I was on.
Not objectively right, mind you. I want to be careful here. I am not claiming the kind of divine moral clarity that gets people into trouble at dinner parties, social media walls, television debates, and, rather more intensely, in election campaigns. What I mean is something more personal and therefore, I think, more honest: that in any given conflict, between any given set of belligerents, my moral compass pointed somewhere specific and pointed there immediately. It was built, as all such compasses are, from the bottom up: by my parents, by my teachers, by books read at impressionable (and not-so-impressionable) ages, by arguments won handsomely and lost humiliatingly (but always learnt from), by travels that rearranged my intellectual Lego pieces that no amount of comfortable reading at home could have shifted, and by my own thought (yes, I argue with myself, almost all the time; and sometimes, though not always, surprisingly, I lose). It was my compass. It worked. For four decades.
And then came Iran. And Israel. And Saudi Arabia. And the United States. And I found myself, for the first time in four decades, staring at the needle and watching it spin.
I will not rehearse the full geopolitical argument here. That comes later. Maybe. But the shape of it is this: Imagine in your apartment complex, a woman is torturing her child quite openly. The next-door neighbours decide this is an excellent moment to intervene. They do so loudly, publicly, and with great moral fanfare. They also, it happens, have long coveted her flat and are willing to pay a lowball price for it, which has always been rejected. And everyone in the building knows about their longstanding desire, though nobody seems particularly embarrassed about it. In some conversations, mostly private, the flat (and how badly the next-door neighbours want to acquire it cheaply) has been mentioned. But publicly? Always the child. Always for the child.
Now, this would be complicated enough. But the neighbour also has two brothers, living in the same building, who beat and abuse their own wives and children with similar, perhaps even more enthusiasm. And these domestic abusers, far from being an impediment to the faux moral crusade, are his closest allies.
And there I am, a member of this building’s residents’ association for 40 years, suddenly unable to draft the minutes.
That is how I feel about the fascist USA, with apartheid Israel and extremist Saudi Arabia on their side, attacking Iran and assassinating the theocratic, oppressive leader.
I want to be clear about what this feeling was. It was not confusion in the ordinary sense. It was not the mild discomfort of a complex situation requiring more information. It was not the inability to get my head around the nuance. It was the specific, vertiginous sensation of an instrument you have trusted completely, suddenly and without warning, failing you. Like waking up in the middle of the night and finding that the door to your bathroom has moved. Like discovering, at 53, that the thing you thought was a compass was, in fact, just a needle. And that the north it had been pointing to all these years was not the Earth’s north but the particular north that your particular life, in your particular time, in your particular place, had constructed for it.
Which raises, naturally, an uncomfortable question.
If my compass was constructed, and it was, I built it myself from whatever materials my life provided, then so was everyone else’s, including, presumably, the people who built the curricula I studied, the books I read, the arguments I absorbed, and the opinions I formed. Which means the north I have been pointing to, with such confidence, for four decades, was never really north. It was the particular north that I, in my particular life, in my particular time, in my particular place, in a particular context, from a particular perspective and a particular angle, had agreed (with no one in particular, and with everyone who was around me) to call north.
And today, at 53 years of age, I have just found this out.
Of course, this is not moral relativism. Realising that all moral compasses are constructed is not the same as saying that all directions are equal. Some things are still wrong. Unambiguously, irredeemably, across any compass calibration you care to use, wrong.
So, Hitler (or Baby Hitler, in case you prefer that) is always the right answer. But, and this is my question: Is he the only answer?
III. Why Hitler? Why Not Churchill?
Hitler is the right answer, of course, in the sense that a loyalty test always has a right answer. He was, and I want to reiterate this with some force (before the argument digresses into contentious territory and becomes about him, or me), comprehensively and irredeemably monstrous. The industrialisation of murder. The bureaucratisation of genocide. The extraordinary, painstaking administrative effort involved in ensuring that an entire category of human being was first humiliated, then dispossessed, then transported, then killed, and then (and this is the detail that still staggers me) documented. All of it documented. Filed. Archived. As though posterity were being invited to admire the efficiency.
Have no doubts. There is no grey in Hitler. None. People far smarter, far more objective, far more knowledgeable, have looked. And reported back. There is nothing. He is, as far as the historical record permits us to judge, the closest thing to an absolute that the 20th century produced.
And yet.
The question is not whether Hitler was evil. The question is whether evil is a characteristic of individuals, or of conditions. And if conditions (which is where the evidence rather uncomfortably points), then killing the individual leaves the conditions entirely intact. More on that shortly.
But first, I want to spend some time with a man who, for a significant portion of my life, I considered something close to a hero. A man whose wartime speeches I read with genuine admiration. Whose underground war rooms in London I visited with something embarrassingly close to reverence. In front of whose statue I stood, looking up, feeling the appropriate feelings of awe.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.
I want to talk about what Churchill actually did. Not the Churchill of the speeches. Not the Churchill of the V-sign and the cigar and the Blitz spirit. The other one. The one who was operating, with considerable energy and very little restraint, before Hitler had presumably finished school.
It begins, as so much of the 20th century’s grief with the British begins, with a boat. Two boats, in fact. In 1914, the Ottoman Empire (already called, with the casual cruelty of European diplomacy, “the sick man of Europe,” already tottering on the edge of financial, political, and social collapse) had commissioned two dreadnought warships from British shipyards. These were not government vessels in any ordinary sense. The money to build them had been raised by public subscription. Ordinary Turkish subjects, none of them wealthy, had donated what they could. The ships were theirs, in some meaningful emotional sense, in the way that things paid for by ordinary people with ordinary money become, briefly, symbols of national dignity, pride, and, I dare say, self-respect.
Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, confiscated them. His reasoning was that he feared they might fall into German hands, though he had no specific intelligence to that effect; and the rather more compelling explanation is that he was Churchill, and the ships were there, and the Admiralty wanted them. The Ottoman government, which had been negotiating a treaty of neutrality with Britain, found itself humiliated, financially devastated, and suddenly rather more receptive to the Germans, who had been quietly offering them an alliance. The Ottomans signed a secret treaty with the Germans two days later, and eventually joined the war on the German side.
Which led, directly, to Gallipoli: a naval campaign through the Dardanelles that was meant to knock the Ottomans out of the war quickly and elegantly, and which instead became one of the great military catastrophes of the 20th century. Hundreds of thousands dead. The ANZAC forces (Australian and New Zealand troops who had travelled to the other side of the world to die on a Turkish beach, for reasons that grow murkier the longer you look at them). And, as a consequence of the Ottoman resistance, the emergence of a certain Mustafa Kemal, the hero of the Dardanelles, who would later rename himself Ataturk.
But before we follow the line further, we need to understand what the Ottoman entry into the war actually unleashed, because it is the thing that drove everything that followed.
When the Ottomans joined the German side, the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed V, who held the additional and rather more consequential title of Caliph, the spiritual leader of the world’s Sunni Muslims, declared a holy jihad against Britain and her allies. The British Empire in 1914 contained, at a conservative estimate, somewhere between 70 and 100 million Muslim subjects, spread across India, Egypt, Sudan, Malaya, and beyond. These were not distant abstractions. They were soldiers in the imperial army, labourers in the imperial economy, subjects whose continued loyalty was not a matter of sentiment but of survival. The prospect of a Caliph’s call to holy war echoing through every mosque from Karachi to Cairo was not a theological inconvenience. It was an existential threat.
And so the British panicked, and with the particular desperation of an empire that has just discovered a crack in its foundations, they began making promises. To anyone who might help neutralise the Caliph’s call. To anyone who might persuade the Muslim world that the British were, in fact, their friends, their protectors, their partners in a glorious post-Ottoman future. In short: they began making promises with the breezy confidence of a man spending money he does not yet have, and has no particular intention of repaying. In short: An upper-class Brit.
To the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali (who, as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites, carried his own considerable religious authority and could, if persuaded, offer a counter-narrative to the Caliph’s jihad), they wrote a series of letters, the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, running from July 1915 to March 1916, promising British support for a vast, independent Arab kingdom in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans. Hussein, sufficiently convinced, launched exactly that revolt in June 1916. His sons rode into battle believing they were fighting for Arab freedom. They were not, quite (though the film made on that won 7 out of the 10 Oscars it was nominated for).
Because simultaneously, between late 1915 and May 1916, two men named Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot had been meeting in secret (not within a thousand miles of the region they were carving up) to draw a rather different map. With what a later British Prime Minister would call an “egregious” and “foolish” document, they divided the Ottoman Arab territories between Britain and France along lines that adhered to no historical boundary, no tribal reality, no cultural logic, and no geographical common sense (“from the E in Acre to the last K in Kirkuk”). The territory that would become Syria and Lebanon went to France. Iraq and Jordan went to Britain. Palestine was to be placed under international administration, though that arrangement would not survive the decade. And the world, it seems, will not be able to survive this mess created by silly, self-important white men with pencils and rulers and maps.
The Arabs found out about Sykes-Picot in November 1917, when the Bolsheviks, newly in power after the Russian Revolution, published the secret agreement to the world with the cheerful malice of people who had nothing left to lose. They were, understandably, enraged. They had been fighting and dying for a promise that their supposed allies had already quietly buried.
In the same month came the Balfour Declaration: a rather ill-timed, and with hindsight equally ill-thought-out, letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, expressing British support for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. This is the point routinely misunderstood in popular memory. The promise of a Jewish homeland was not a response to the Holocaust. It predated the Holocaust by nearly three decades. The Jews were not promised Israel because of Hitler. They were promised Israel before anyone had heard of Hitler: for a mixture of genuine moral concern, Biblical romanticism, and the strategic calculation of an empire that wanted a friendly foothold in a post-Ottoman Middle East.
Three promises, then, made to three different audiences, for the same piece of land, within the space of two years. The McMahon-Hussein correspondence. Sykes-Picot. The Balfour Declaration. Each one contradicting the others. None of them made in ignorance of the contradictions.
Churchill’s direct role came later, at the Cairo Conference of 1921, where as Colonial Secretary he presided over the final settlement of the mandate borders: installing Faisal (Hussein’s son, the same man who had ridden into Damascus believing he was liberating the Arab world) as King of Iraq, and drawing the lines that created the modern states of Iraq, Jordan, and the boundaries of Mandatory Palestine. These were not lines drawn with any particular care for the people living inside them. They were lines drawn with the care of a man arranging furniture in a house that does not belong to him.
Let us draw the line from Churchill further still. To the resentments generated by these broken promises. To the arbitrary borders that put people who had been killing each other for centuries into the same nation state, and separated people who had been the same community for centuries with an international frontier: the Indo-Pakistan partition. To the blood that followed. To the blood that is still following, 78 years later. To the rise of political Islam, in part a response to the humiliation of the post-Ottoman settlement. To the rise of Hindutva, in part a response to the partition and its aftermath. To the state of Israel, established in 1948, and to every war, occupation, and atrocity that has followed from that establishment. All the way to this morning’s news.
A single line. From two confiscated ships in a British harbour in 1914, to the world as it exists in 2026.
IV. The Regress
So. You have your time machine. You have considered the case against Hitler. You have now also considered the case against Churchill. And you are beginning to suspect, with some justification, that this is not going to get simpler.
It is not.
Because here is the problem with the logic of assassination as moral correction: it has no floor. The moment you accept the premise, that going back and removing one person would have made things meaningfully better, you have also accepted that the same logic applies one step further back. And one step further back from that. And so on, with the terrible momentum of an argument that has been allowed to gather speed on a slope with no visible bottom.
Kill Hitler. Fine. But Hitler did not emerge from a vacuum. He emerged from the humiliation of Versailles, from the economic catastrophe of the Weimar Republic, from the particular toxicity of pan-Germanic nationalism that had been fermenting for decades before he arrived to bottle and sell it. The conditions that produced Hitler were already present and operational. He was, in a meaningful sense, a symptom. An efficient and uniquely terrible symptom, granted. But a symptom nonetheless. Kill the symptom; the disease remains. Someone else catches it. Perhaps someone less charismatic, less operationally gifted, less historically legible. But the camps were not Hitler’s idea alone. The bureaucracy that ran them was built by ordinary men who would, in another life, have been accountants and civil servants and schoolteachers: the banality that existed within the evil. The machine did not need the man. The man needed the machine. And the machine was already running.
So perhaps you go back further. Kill the architects of Versailles. Remove Clemenceau, who wanted Germany ground into powder and was more or less given his wish. Remove Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points promised a just peace and whose domestic political failures delivered something rather different. Remove Lloyd George, who knew Versailles was a catastrophe in the making and signed it anyway, and had the decency to say so, quietly, afterwards. Remove any or all of them, and what do you have? A different treaty, perhaps. A less humiliated Germany, perhaps. But a Europe still exhausted and traumatised by four years of industrial slaughter, still bristling with nationalist grievances, still in possession of the ideological raw materials from which the next demagogue would build his particular version of the bonfire. In fact, even if you removed all the Jews from Germany, or indeed all of Europe and Russia, you would still have some other category of people who would have incited the same hatred in Germans, accused of being the supposed cause of all their misery. The same story would have repeated.
So let us go back further still. Remove Bismarck, who unified Germany in 1871 with a deliberate policy of nationalist provocation and created the conditions for the first war that created the conditions for the second. Remove Napoleon, whose continental ambitions redrew the map of Europe and made the subsequent century of nationalist reaction more or less inevitable. Remove Robespierre. Remove Cromwell. Remove whichever pope decided that heresy was a capital offence and lit the first of the fires that would burn for two centuries across Europe.
At each step, the logic holds. At each step, you can construct a perfectly coherent argument for why this particular person, removed at this particular moment, would have spared the world a measurable quantity of suffering. And at each step, you are also one step closer to the realisation that the argument has no terminus.
Because eventually, you arrive here: the most efficient solution, by the logic of this thought experiment, is not to kill Hitler, or Churchill, or Bismarck, or Napoleon. It is to go back approximately 300,000 years, find the first homo sapiens with the particular cognitive mutation that made organised violence, abstract hatred, and bureaucratic cruelty possible, and kill that person. Or why stop there? Get rid of the entire sapiens species. Be thorough about it.
And then what?
The Neanderthals inherit the earth. For a while. And then, in some number of tens of thousands of years, a Neanderthal is sitting with his friends around whatever passes for a late-night fire, and one of them poses a thought experiment. If you could go back in time and kill one person…
Or perhaps it is not the Neanderthals. Perhaps it is something else entirely; some other species that, given sufficient time and sufficient pressure, acquires the particular combination of consciousness, tool use, social organisation, and tribalism that leads, as it always seems to lead, to the same destination. Because the destination is not a product of homo sapiens specifically. It is a product of what happens when any sufficiently complex organism develops the capacity for abstract thought, which includes, inevitably, the capacity for abstract hatred.
The logic of the time machine, followed honestly to its conclusion, does not end with the death of one person. It ends with the extinction of the conditions that produce people like that. And the conditions are not located in any individual. They are located in consciousness itself.
Which is where the argument, if you have been following it carefully, has been pointing all along.
V. Status Quoists and Rebels
Let us step back from the blood for a moment, and think about the people.
Not the monsters. The ordinary people. The ones who, in any given era, in any given country, are simply trying to make sense of the world they have inherited and decide, one way or another, what to do with it.
I want to suggest that there are, at the most fundamental level, only two kinds of people. Not conservatives and liberals, because those words have been stretched and distorted and weaponised to the point where they mean almost nothing stable any more. Not capitalists and communists, not believers and atheists, not nationalists and internationalists. These are all downstream categories. The actual, irreducible distinction, the one that holds regardless of era, culture, ideology, or context, is simpler and more brutal than any of those.
There are status quoists. And there are rebels.
The status quoists are the people who, broadly speaking, are comfortable with the way things are ordered. Not necessarily happy with every detail, not necessarily blind to every flaw, but fundamentally at ease with the structure: the institutions, the hierarchies, the systems and arrangements that currently exist. They may wish to adjust things at the margins. But the architecture, as far as they are concerned, is sound. The furniture may need rearranging, but the building does not need burning down.
The rebels want to burn it down. Or at least, to substantially restructure it. Some by violent means; some by intellectual discourse; some by democratic process; some by the slower, more patient method of cultural pressure applied over decades. The means are immaterial. What defines them is the conviction that the current arrangement is not merely imperfect but fundamentally wrong, and that no amount of marginal adjustment will reach the root of the problem.
Now here is the thing that makes this distinction genuinely interesting, rather than merely obvious: it is not fixed to any ideology. It is fixed to circumstance, and to moment.
The communists of revolutionary Russia were rebels. The communists of contemporary China are status quoists, defending an established order against precisely the kind of people who would have been their ideological ancestors a century ago. The American conservatives who wanted Trump in 2016 were rebels, furious at an establishment they felt had ignored and condescended to them for decades; they wanted to set fire to the whole arrangement and watch it burn. And they got their wish. And now, having set the fire, they have become the status quoists, defending the bonfire against the people who want to put it out. The liberals who were the status quoists of the Obama years are now the rebels, appalled at what has replaced it. They are out on the streets. Shouting at the police. And wearing F**k Trump tees.
The labels flip. The underlying dynamic does not.
And here is the other thing: age matters. Not because older people become stupid, or lazy, or morally compromised (though all of these happen, obviously, and with some regularity). But because the longer you live, the more you have seen the rebels become the establishment, and the establishment become the target, and the wheel turn again. And again. And if you have watched this happen two or three times, in your own lifetime, with your own eyes, a certain scepticism begins to set in. Not about the need for change. About the permanence of any particular change.
Young people are rebels almost by definition. It does not matter what they are rebelling against. Born into a conservative household, they rebel leftward. Born into a progressive one, they rebel rightward. Born into a household of athletes, they become musicians. Born into a household of intellectuals, they join the army. The specific direction of the rebellion is almost beside the point. The rebellion itself is the point. It is the mechanism by which each generation asserts that the world belongs to them now, and not to their parents.
And then, slowly, without quite noticing it happening, the rebels become the status quoists. Not because they abandon their principles. But because the world catches up with some of those principles, and makes them ordinary, and the frontier moves on without them. Dawkins called it the moving moral zeitgeist. Its main property is that it keeps moving.
Which brings us to the window.
The moral Overton window is the range of ideas that a society considers acceptable at any given moment. Outside it: unthinkable, radical, dangerous, the province of cranks and extremists. Inside it: mainstream, debatable, reasonable, the stuff of ordinary political life. The window moves. It has always moved. And the people who move it are, without exception, the people who were standing outside it, pressing their faces against the glass.
In Lincoln’s America, the abolitionists were outside the window. Then they were inside it. And then abolition became so thoroughly inside the window that anyone standing outside it today is not considered a political dissident but a moral defective. In pre-World War I Britain, the suffragettes were outside the window. In 1980s South Africa, the anti-apartheid movement was outside the window. In the days of Section 377 in India, the decriminalisation of homosexuality was outside the window. Each of these causes was, at the time of its advocacy, considered not merely wrong but dangerous, destabilising, a threat to the social order that decent people had built and wished to preserve.
And now they are the social order.
And now there are new people outside the window, pressing their faces against the glass, being told that they are dangerous and destabilising. And in 50 years, some of them will be inside the window, and will seem so obvious, so self-evident, so basic, that it will be difficult to explain to children why anyone ever thought otherwise.
The window moves. It has always moved. And the people who move it are always, in their moment, dissatisfied. They have to be. Dissatisfaction is not a bug in the system. It is the engine.
But here is what I have begun to notice, at 53: the window moves, but it never arrives. There is no destination. There is no point at which the people inside the window will look around and say: yes, this is it, the work is done, the world is ordered as it ought to be. Because by the time they are inside the window, the window has moved again. And they are, almost without noticing, the new status quoists. Defending gains that someone else fought for, against the next generation of rebels who find those gains insufficient, or misdirected, or beside the point entirely.
I do not say this with despair. I say it with the particular unease of a man who has spent 40 years knowing which side of the window he was on, and who has recently begun to wonder whether the window itself is the point, rather than any particular view through it.
VI. The Only Possible World
And so we return, finally, to the time machine.
You have it. It works. You can go back to any point in history, find any person, and remove them from the timeline. You have considered Hitler. You have considered Churchill. You have followed the logic all the way back to the first homo sapiens and discovered, with some discomfort, that the logic does not stop there either.
But everything so far has been, at its heart, a practical argument. Kill Hitler and someone else runs the machine. Remove Churchill and someone else draws the lines. Eliminate the first homo sapiens and some other species develops consciousness and tribalism and the capacity for organised cruelty. The argument has been: it would not have worked. The conditions would have reasserted themselves.
What I want to suggest now is something more radical. Not merely that it would not have worked. But that it could not have. That the question contains, buried at its foundation, an assumption so large and so unexamined that the entire thought experiment rests on it without anyone noticing.
The assumption is this: that the timeline was contingent. That at each of those branching points, things could genuinely have gone otherwise. That the branch was real. That the other paths were available.
I want to consider the possibility that they were not.
Consider everything that preceded any single moment in history. Every prior decision, by every prior person, shaped by every prior condition, which was itself shaped by every prior decision before that, stretching back without interruption to the beginning of whatever you believe the beginning to have been. The Big Bang, if you are scientifically inclined. The first word, if you are theologically inclined. It does not, for the purposes of this argument, particularly matter.
The point is the chain. The unbroken, unimaginably complex, utterly specific chain of cause and effect that had to produce exactly these conditions, in exactly this configuration, for exactly this moment to occur. For Churchill to be standing in exactly the right position of authority, with exactly the right combination of ego and ambition and strategic anxiety, to confiscate exactly those ships, on exactly that day. For the particular biochemistry of Adolf Hitler’s brain, shaped by his particular childhood and his particular complexes, his particular failures and his particular hatreds, to interact with the particular conditions of Weimar Germany in exactly the way that it did. For you to be reading this, now, with the particular history you carry, in the particular moment you inhabit.
Was any of it, genuinely, other than it was?
I am not making a theological argument. I am not suggesting that everything happens for a reason, in the consoling sense that phrase is usually deployed, generally by people who have not thought very carefully about what it would actually mean if it were true. I am making something closer to a physical argument, perhaps a philosophical one, about the nature of causation.
If every effect has a cause, and every cause is itself an effect, and the chain runs unbroken from the first moment to this one, then the branching points were never really branches. They only look like branches from inside the timeline, where we have the peculiar disadvantage of being unable to see the whole. From outside, with full information, the tree is a single line. Not the best line. Not a line that anyone designed or intended or would have chosen. Simply the only line that the prior conditions could have produced.
The world is not the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz said that, and he was wrong, or at least he was making a theological argument that requires a benevolent designer, which I am not. The world is not the best possible world. It may be, in many respects, a terrible world. It contains Churchill and Hitler and Sykes and Picot and a great many other people who caused a great deal of suffering that was real and is still reverberating.
But it may be the only possible world. The one that had to emerge from everything that came before it. Not designed. Not optimised. Not the product of anyone’s intention. Simply: inevitable, given the prior conditions, all the way down.
And if that is true, even provisionally, even as a thought worth sitting with rather than a doctrine to be adopted, then the time machine is not merely impractical. It is conceptually incoherent. You cannot go back and change things, not because you lack the technology, but because the thing you are proposing to change was not, in any meaningful sense, a choice. It was the output of a system so vast and so thoroughly determined by everything that preceded it that the concept of an alternative simply does not apply.
At 53, I notice my thinking crystallising. Not in every direction; I am still capable of changing my mind, still capable of being surprised. But in certain deep structural ways, I can feel the thinking hardening. The positions that were once conclusions have become, in some cases, premises. The questions I once held open I have, without quite deciding to, begun to hold closed.
For a long time, I found this troubling. It felt like a narrowing. Like something being lost.
But I wonder now whether it is simply the personal version of the same process. Whether the crystallising of a mind at 53, shaped by everything that has happened to it over 53 years, every loss and argument and bankruptcy and insight and conversation and book and road and relationship, is not a failure of openness but simply the inevitable output of that specific accumulation of experience, that specific chain of cause and effect, arriving at this specific moment.
I did not choose to think what I think. I was produced into thinking it. As you were. As everyone is.
The only possible mind, inside the only possible world.
VII. The Only Possible Me
I would not go back and kill Hitler.
Not because he did not deserve it. Not because the suffering was not real. Not because the six million dead, and the tens of millions of others who died in the war his particular pathology helped ignite, do not constitute a claim on our moral imagination that demands some response. They do. They always will.
But because the world in which Hitler existed was the only world that could have existed, given everything that preceded it. And any world in which I go back and remove him is not an alternative world. It is a fantasy. A consolation. A way of feeling, briefly and at no personal cost, like one of the good people.
I have spent 40 years being one of the good people. I knew which side I was on. I knew who was right and who was wrong, in every conflict, on every question, with the confident instinctiveness of a man who has built a compass and trusts it absolutely. I marched, metaphorically at the very least, on the right side of the window. I was, if I am being honest, rather pleased with myself about it.
And then the compass broke. Not catastrophically, not all at once, but in the specific, vertiginous way that instruments fail when the conditions they were calibrated for no longer exist. Iran. Israel. Saudi Arabia. The United States. A situation in which every actor is wrong, in which the moral clarity I had relied on for four decades simply declined to show up, in which I stood in the residents’ association meeting of the world and found that I could not draft the minutes.
And in that failure, epiphany.
If my compass was constructed, then so was everyone else’s. If my certainties were the product of my specific accumulation of experience, my specific place in time, my specific angle of approach to a world that looks different depending entirely on where you are standing, then the certainty itself was never the point. The certainty was just what it felt like, from the inside, to be me: this particular combination of influences and accidents and choices and consequences, arriving, inevitably, at these particular conclusions.
I did not build my moral compass. I was built by it. Or rather, we built each other simultaneously, the compass and I, out of the same materials, in the same process, with no external reference point to check our work against. Which means that the north I have been pointing to, with such confidence, for four decades, was always just the north that this specific life, lived in this specific way, at this specific moment in history, was going to produce.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is not an argument for doing nothing, for caring about nothing, for retreating into a private world and watching the rest of it burn with a certain sang froid philosophical detachment. The rebels are still necessary. The window still needs moving. The dissatisfied young are still the engine of whatever moral progress the species manages to make, lurching and incomplete and always overshooting in one direction before correcting in another.
But I am 53. And I have watched the wheel turn. And I have begun to understand, not as a defeat but as a kind of arrival, that the wheel was always going to turn. That the world I was so certain needed fixing was already being fixed, in its own way, at its own pace, by forces so much larger than any individual’s moral clarity that the clarity itself, however genuine, however hard-won, was always a little beside the point.
The only possible world produced the only possible Churchill, and the only possible Hitler, and the only possible Sykes and Picot, and the only possible victims of all of them, and the only possible people who tried to prevent it and failed, and the only possible people who tried to prevent it and partially succeeded, and the only possible people who are trying right now, with the same urgency and the same incomplete information and the same constructed compasses, to prevent whatever comes next.
And it produced me. This specific, stubborn, twice-divorced, three-times-bankrupted, motorcycle-riding, golf-playing, endlessly-opinionated 53-year-old, sitting at a computer, trying to think clearly about a question that turns out, on examination, to have no clean answer (unless, of course, it is 42, which is a joke that seems to have lost its charm on me recently). Formed by everything that happened to him. Incapable, finally, of having turned out otherwise.
I would not go back and kill Hitler. I can’t. Neither, for that matter, could you.
Not because time travel is impossible. But because the world as it exists today is, in ways that are difficult to define precisely but impossible to dismiss, inevitable.
We are all, every one of us, the only possible version of ourselves, inside the only possible version of the world. And that is not a comfortable thought. It is not a thought that resolves anything, or consoles anything, or makes the suffering retroactively meaningful, or provides the clean moral satisfaction of knowing which side to be on.
It is simply, as far as I can determine, true.
And sitting with a true thought that offers no comfort is, I have come to believe, the closest thing to wisdom that a person like me, in a world like this, is ever likely to manage.
