Marshall opens the final chapter with Ludwig Wittgenstein, born 1889 in Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — youngest of nine children of Karl Wittgenstein, who had built "one of the largest fortunes in Europe in steel" (compared to Andrew Carnegie; the family was the second-wealthiest in Austria-Hungary after the Rothschilds). The device is hindsight. "It was not-at-all obvious that Austria-Hungary would be dismantled in the Great War; it is only obvious with hindsight." Less obvious still: that "the untalented son of one Alois Hitler, a minor customs official, would come to take over the war-ravaged and beaten-down Germany some decades later — and absorb Austria into the Third Reich" via the Anschluss. In "one of those odd quirks of history," Ludwig was born six days after Alois's son Adolf — "they almost certainly met each other in school, though they would have had very little in common." "No, none of this was obvious — in fact, if we try to place ourselves in the shoes of those living in Vienna and Cambridge of those years, it seems positively absurd." The disastrous rise of Nazism "wasn't even 'non-obvious' — it would have seemed *impossibly absurd* if you tried to explain to someone in the early 1900's that this was what was going to happen." The lesson sits beneath the chapter on greatness: the outcomes we treat as inevitable were, to those who lived them, genuinely uncertain. Hindsight manufactures a false obviousness that the living never had. --- *Source: [[Book Inventory/Progression|Progression]] (Sebastian Marshall, 2016) — Uncommon Virtues #9 — The Great and the Sublime*