Ihor Kendiukhov

Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town.

Fast, professional, well-equipped.

they are expected to arrive in two to three minutes.

In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it would indeed be an act of great arrogance and even utter insanity to go into the fire yourself in the hope of rescuing someone or something.

The most likely outcome would be that you would find yourself among those who need to be rescued.

But the calculus changes drastically if the closest fire crew is three hours away and consists of drunk, unfit amateurs.

Or consider a child living in a big, happy, smart family.

Imagine this child suddenly decides that his family may run out of money to the point where they won't have enough to eat.

All reassurances from his parents don't work.

The child doesn't believe in his parents' ability to reason, he makes his own calculations, and he strongly believes he is right and they are wrong.

He is dead set on fixing the situation by doing day trading.

What is that if not going nuts?

Would those be wrong who ridicule this child and his complete mischaracterization of his own relative abilities?

Would it not be an act of benevolence to just stop the child, by any means necessary, from executing his deranged plan and bring him back to the care of his parents?

But now imagine that the child doesn't live in a big, happy, smart family.

He is homeless in a town of other homeless children.

There are some adults, like 20 of them, but all of them are occupied with preventing the nearby dam from breaking and flooding the town.

This child doesn't sit and wait for adults to come and feed him, like a responsible, correctly estimating his own abilities, non-arrogant, well-behaved entity he is supposed to be in the eyes of people from an alternative reality where towns are populated by big hordes of smart, competent adults.

He goes outside, makes some tools to catch birds, tools are dangerous, they may hurt him, and they are just a joke compared to professional hunting equipment, and then lights a fire to cook what he managed to capture, the fire may of course burn his fingers, and there are no safety protocols, it is just a fire in a semi-abandoned post-apocalyptic town, and overall that's not how experienced adults would do it.

Is he still an arrogant, inappropriate fool?