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A man is walking through the streets of Amsterdam and he hears a scream and a splash. It’s cold. He’s going somewhere. He’s not sure what he heard. So he ignores it. But with time, the horrific, inescapable conclusion becomes undeniable to him: Someone had leapt or fallen into the canal and he could have saved them. From his indifference came the death of an innocent person.
This is, of course, the plot of Albert Camus’ The Fall, his 1956 haunting novel about a Paris defense lawyer’s fall from grace. Yet this fictional tale was also an allegory—hadn’t millions of Europeans, including many on those very streets of Amsterdam, turned a similar blind eye to the plight of the Jews just a few years earlier? Is it not also a message that resounds today? Millions of people die everyday of entirely preventable illnesses and accidents. Millions just perished in a pandemic, some percentage of them needlessly so. Were others (and their leaders) a little more willing to do something other than shrug their shoulders, they could’ve been saved.
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius chastises himself for the injustices he is guilty of—not things he did, so much as the things he didn’t do. “And you can also commit an injustice by doing nothing,” he writes. Marcus was a great leader and by all accounts a good person, yet like all of us, he could have done more. It was this, at the end of his life, that haunted him.
It will probably haunt you too. You could do more. You know you should do more. But where do you start? You say to yourself, if someone went into the water near me, if someone was starving near me, I would help them. But they are. A plane flight away. A country away.
And you easily could do something.
GiveWell.org estimates right now that for $3,000 you can save a human life in Nigeria. According to the World Health Organization, around 200,000 people die there each year of malaria, a largely treatable and preventable mosquito-borne illness. Just a few thousand dollars buys enough monthly courses of preventive malaria medication to save one person. There are one million subscribers to this daily email—a significant percentage of them could afford, on their own, to save a human from death right now! How crazy is that? A few could afford to save many humans. And the rest could come together, chipping in a little bit each to collectively do the same.
This is something the Stoics did not talk about enough. The way that one singular person could make a difference, but also the way that people working together can do even more. We have all sorts of tools and insights that allow us to do this more effectively and efficiently than Marcus Aurelius could have ever imagined.
We should not turn away from that. We should lean into it—proudly and loudly. Be able to say, I saved someone’s life.
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