One of the things I love about history is that the more you learn about it, the more complicated basically everything becomes. It’s also one of the things that can make history incredibly uncomfortable, because eventually you have to deal with the fact that most of the people doing terrible things probably didn’t think they were terrible people.
Obviously, there are exceptions. History has given us some truly awful human beings, and I’m not suggesting we need to sit around trying to figure out how every genocidal dictator was secretly just misunderstood. Some people knew exactly what they were doing. But most people throughout history weren’t dictators or generals or presidents. They were regular people living regular lives, and I think that’s actually the part we should spend more time thinking about.
Because regular people are really fucking good at convincing themselves they’re doing the right thing.
We can justify almost anything if we really want to. We’re protecting our family. We’re protecting our country. We’re following the law. We’re maintaining order. We’re defending our traditions. We’re just doing our job. Everybody else is doing it. What am I supposed to do about it anyway?
And that’s the part that gets me. Very few people think they’re on the wrong side of history while they’re standing there. Everyone has a reason. Everyone has an explanation. Everyone has a way of making what they’re doing fit into a version of the world where they’re still a decent person.
Yet somehow history keeps ending up with a wrong side.
We Get to Cheat When We Study History
Looking backward is easy because we already have the answer key. We know slavery was wrong. We know segregation was wrong. We know the Holocaust was evil. We can look at a photograph of a Black child walking into an integrated school while a crowd of adults screams at them and immediately know which people in that picture we don’t want to be.
Of course we do. We know how the story ends.
The people in those photographs didn’t have BAD GUY floating above their heads. They had reasons for being there. They had politicians telling them they were right. They had newspapers telling them they were right. Their friends probably agreed with them. Their neighbors probably agreed with them. In some places, most of the people they knew may have agreed with them.
They weren’t standing there thinking, I can’t wait to look absolutely fucking terrible in a history book someday.
They thought they were right.
That’s something I think we lose when history gets compressed into a couple of paragraphs in a textbook. We turn everything into good people and bad people because that’s an easy way to understand the past. Then we put ourselves on the good side because, obviously, we agree with the good people.
But we already know which side was good.
They didn’t.
“That’s Just How Things Were Back Then”
I hear this one a lot whenever we talk about people in history doing something awful. “Well, that’s just how things were back then.”
And sometimes, yeah. That’s important.
I don’t think it makes sense to take somebody who lived in 1820 and expect them to have the exact worldview of somebody living in 2026. People are products of the world around them. Culture matters. Education matters. The information available to someone matters. If we’re actually trying to understand history instead of just judging everyone in it, we have to acknowledge that.
But there’s a problem with using that explanation too much.
It wasn’t how everyone was.
There were abolitionists while slavery was legal. There were people fighting segregation while segregation was still happening. There were people advocating for women’s rights when the idea was considered ridiculous by huge parts of society. There were Germans who resisted the Nazis while other Germans went along with them.
Those people didn’t get a newsletter from the future.
They were living at the exact same time as everybody else. They were surrounded by the same culture and heard many of the same arguments, and somehow they still managed to look around and say, This isn’t right.
So yes, historical context matters. A lot.
But sometimes people knew better.
And that’s harder to dismiss.
Obviously I Would Have Been One of the Good Ones
This is where things get uncomfortable for me personally.
I’d like to believe that if I had lived during slavery, I would have been an abolitionist. I’d like to think that if I had lived in Nazi Germany, I would have resisted. If I had been alive during the Civil Rights Movement, I would have supported it.
And maybe I would have.
I really hope I would have.
But how the hell would I know?
I’m imagining myself being dropped into 1940 with all of my 2026 knowledge still intact. Of course that version of me knows what to do. I’ve read the books. I’ve watched the documentaries. I’ve seen the photographs. I know how the war ends. I know what was happening in the camps. I know who history remembers as the heroes and who it remembers as the monsters.
That’s not how it would have worked.
I would have been born into that world. I would have been raised by people from that world. My teachers, friends, coworkers, neighbors, politicians, newspapers, and probably most of the institutions around me would have influenced what I thought was normal. And depending on where and when we’re talking about, deciding that everyone around me was wrong could have cost me friendships, my job, my freedom, or my life.
Would I still have done the right thing?
I hope so.
That’s the only answer I can give without lying to myself.
Most of Us Probably Wouldn’t Have Been Heroes
I think movies have kind of screwed us up here.
We always imagine ourselves as the resistance fighter. We’re the one hiding people in the attic. We’re the one standing up to the angry mob. We’re the one telling the authoritarian government to go fuck itself while dramatic music plays in the background.
Statistically, that’s probably not who most of us would have been.
Most people weren’t the villain, either. Most people were just…there.
They went to work. They came home. They raised their kids. They paid their bills. They complained about whatever people complained about at the time. They probably saw things they disagreed with and sometimes talked about them privately. Maybe they thought something was wrong but didn’t think it was their responsibility to fix it. Maybe they didn’t want to risk their job or their family. Maybe they figured someone else would handle it.
Maybe they were just tired.
That’s not particularly exciting, so those people don’t get many movies made about them. But they were probably the majority.
And if I’m going to be realistic about where I would have fit into history, that’s probably the group I need to compare myself to. Not the hero. Not the monster. The regular person who is just trying to get through Tuesday while something historically important is happening three blocks away.
Because that’s basically what all of us are doing right now.
Which Means We’re Wrong About Something
This is the thought that really messes with me.
There is absolutely no chance that we finally figured everything out.
Every generation before us believed some things that future generations thought were insane, cruel, stupid, or all three. But somehow we have this tendency to look at ourselves like we’re the finished version of humanity.
We aren’t.
There are things happening right now that people in fifty or a hundred years are going to look back on and ask, What the fuck were they thinking?
I wish I knew what those things were.
Seriously.
Because I don’t want to be the guy in the history book standing in the background thinking everything is fine.
But that’s the catch. If I knew which things I was wrong about, I probably wouldn’t be wrong about them anymore.
Maybe there’s something I believe right now because it’s what I’ve always been told. Maybe there’s something I haven’t bothered learning enough about. Maybe something benefits me personally, so I’ve never had much incentive to question it. Maybe there’s something happening that I know isn’t right, but I’ve convinced myself isn’t really my problem.
I genuinely don’t know.
And I think that’s a much healthier place to start than assuming I’m right about everything.
Being a Good Person Isn’t Something You Finish
I think we sometimes treat being a good person like a checklist. Believe the correct things, don’t do the obviously terrible things, treat people reasonably well, and congratulations, you’ve completed morality.
I don’t think it works like that.
You have to keep checking yourself. You have to keep learning. Sometimes you have to listen to somebody whose experience is completely different from yours and resist the urge to immediately explain why they’re wrong. Sometimes you have to sit with the possibility that something you’ve believed for years might not hold up anymore.
And sometimes you have to say, “Yeah, I was wrong.”
Which sucks.
Nobody enjoys that.
If somebody proves me wrong, there is definitely a part of my brain that would prefer to spend the next forty-five minutes finding some incredibly specific technicality that means I was actually right the entire time.
But being wrong isn’t the problem.
Staying wrong because admitting it hurts your pride is the problem.
There are things I believed when I was younger that I don’t believe anymore. I hope there are things I believe today that I’ll understand differently ten years from now. If I reach sixty years old and have exactly the same worldview I had at thirty, I don’t think that means I was incredibly wise at thirty. It probably means I stopped paying attention.
We Don’t Get the Answer Key This Time
I still hope I would have been one of the good ones.
I hope I would have opposed slavery. I hope I would have resisted the Nazis. I hope I would have marched for civil rights. I hope I would have spoken up when doing so actually cost something.
But those tests are over.
I don’t get credit for answering questions when somebody already wrote the correct answer underneath them.
The only test that actually matters for me is the one happening now.
And that’s considerably harder because nobody is going to tell us what we’re being tested on. There’s no giant chapter heading over 2026 that says HERE’S THE THING EVERYONE IS GOING TO BE ASHAMED OF IN SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS.
We have to figure it out while we’re living through it.
The best I can come up with is to keep learning, keep asking questions, and occasionally force myself to seriously consider the possibility that I’m wrong. Listen to people whose lives are different from mine. Learn enough history to recognize when we’ve seen something before. Be especially suspicious whenever somebody starts explaining why a particular group of people deserves less dignity, fewer rights, or less consideration than everyone else.
And every once in a while, look at something everyone around me considers completely normal and ask:
Why?
Not because everything we’ve built is wrong. Not because everyone in the future will automatically be smarter or better than us. And definitely not because I think I’ve somehow cracked the code and figured out how to always be on the right side of history.
Quite the opposite.
History is full of people who were absolutely convinced they were the good guys.
I just don’t want to make the mistake of assuming I am.