Would you press the button?

Richard Kelly’s recent screenplay adaptation, The Box (2009), is based on a simple but haunting short story by Richard Matheson.

A small wooden box arrives on the doorstep of a married couple.  The box turns out to be a button.  If they press the button within 24 hours, they are told that two things will happen.  First, they will receive the sum of 1 million dollars.  Second, someone, somewhere in the world that they do not know, will die.

So what would you do, if the box arrived on your doorstep tomorrow morning?

Lying awake last night, I thought how easy it was to think that I would take the moral high ground and return the box unopened.  But then I began to play with the idea a little.

What if the reward was not 1 million dollars but something else?  Would I press it just to realize the dream of finally seeing England win the football world cup?  Would I press it in exchange for a long and healthy life?  Would I be prepared to extinguish a life in exchange for the knowledge that my children will grow up to be the best that they could be?

It would be tempting.  Of that, there is no doubt.  But then I got to wondering about the inevitable victim – in the event that I did decide to ‘press’.  People I know would not be affected – so clearly my immediate family would be covered, along with extended family members, colleagues and close friends.  But how would I feel if I later discovered that the victim turned out to be a neighbor or ‘friend of a friend’?  How far removed from me would this individual have to be, not to upset my sense that it was worth it?  I would not want them to be a child, or a mother or father; neither an upstanding person in their community; nor anyone who has not had their chance to live out their own dreams, nor… when is a life not worth saving?

Waking up this morning, I found myself relieved to find that there was no box on my doorstep.  But perhaps the dilemma of this game is closer to home than at first we might imagine.  Every day we make choices; choices that push us closer to our dreams, but destroy the dreams of someone else.  We have plenty, we have healthy happy children, we are living the dream – but at what price?  Is there someone, somewhere in the world that pays the price of what we enjoy?

Jean-Paul Sartre once famously said, ‘Hell is other people’.  And I guess that this just about sums it up.  If it wasn’t for everyone else, none of us would be at risk.

But with 6 billion people on the planet, one day I expect I’ll be the victim of someone else’s success.