Reading @JeffSharlet’s and @QuinceMountain's tweets today about the covid death rate & reopening the country, I realized the dynamics at play in this debate are eerily similar to a story I thought about a lot as a kid. It was of course from the Twilight Zone.

In the 1980s Twilight Zone reboot, “Button, Button” told the tale of a financially struggling couple visited by a mysterious man. He gives them a box with a button that when pressed would kill “someone they do not know” & they get cash in return.

At first they’re appalled—who would kill a stranger for money? But the more they think about it, the more they rationalize: “People die every day, what’s one more?”

“Button, button” was adapted from a 1971 Richard Matheson story, but it’s based on a much older moral dilemma, which is often given the unfortunate name “the Chinaman box”.

“Chinaman box” is bit on the nose given the recent “China virus” rhetoric, but it once stood for the idea that the person killed when pressing the button would be someone on the other side of the world—not only a stranger but someone impossible to know.

In 1974 CBS Radio Mystery Theater made an audio drama that put a fine point on the rationalization necessary to kill a stranger and then get on with your life. “You might call it murder before you press the button, but after you’ll call it something else.”

In 2020, we might call pressing the button "reopening the country." Those arguing 2-3% mortality is a price worth paying tend to assume this 2-3% will include people other than their families and friends--not only strangers but those impossible to know.

But the twist in “Button, Button” is the logic of contagion as well. After the couple presses the button & they get paid they’re told the box will now be given to “someone they do not know” – someone who will rationalize their deaths just as they have done.

2-3% of the population may seem like unknowable others, but they are always ourselves – maybe not immediately, maybe not our own individual selves, but the larger community of which we’re all a part.

No doubt sooner or later we will press the button, but when we do we should remember that we are all strangers to others, and yet we choose to look out for each other just same. /END

Adding a couple footnotes because this thread is finding new readers today:
1. The 1980s Twilight Zone episode “Button Button” is online & worth watching. Great as it is, I bet a @JordanPeele remake would be something to see.

2. The 1970s radio drama “The Chinaman Button” is also online and worth a listen. It is in some ways even darker because the moral test makes a good man turn bad and then, well, there will be blood.

3. Finally, a reminder from @FunnyorDie that for many people this moral dilemma is unfortunately no dilemma at all. h/t @emceegocry

Last word on this, I swear. The original source of the would-you-kill-a-stranger question is François-René de Chateaubriand's "The Genius of Christianity" (1802). Adding it here because 1980s television made me who I am, but history is what I do for a living.