How evil spreads

  • Reflect­ing on all this com­puter virus nas­ti­ness, I’m reminded of a bit of a metaphor that came by way of one of those half-hour sci-fi story shows that had a short run in the ’80s. I never watched them, but a friend wanted me to record this one, and when I saw it, I was blown away by its mes­sage, which seems to amount to a kind of modern-day para­ble. I’m going to para­phrase it here with­out any attempt at art, but I think you’ll still get the point. It went some­thing like this:

    A mar­ried cou­ple is liv­ing the plain-but-simple life and hav­ing their share of money trou­bles. One day when the hus­band is at work, a stranger shows up at the door and tells the wife that they’ve been selected at ran­dom and that he needs to give them the small box he’s car­ry­ing. The wife asks all the usual ques­tions, and is put off by how much the stranger seems to know about them and how vague he is about the whole thing.

    The box has a lid that opens to reveal a big red but­ton. She asks what hap­pens if she pushes it, and he answers matter-of-factly that they will receive a lot of money but that some­one will die.

    “They’ll die? Push­ing this but­ton will kill them?”

    “Yes.”

    “Who? Who will it kill?” she asks.

    “Some­one you don’t even know,” he answers.

    She goes through all the rea­son­able responses, but the man is not to be deterred. In the end the box is left at their house, and he takes his leave. She tells her hus­band the whole story and he is duly impressed. But ulti­mately, he thinks the whole thing is stu­pid and tells her to chuck it in the trash.

    She ignores the box at first, but as time wears on, she finds it impos­si­ble to ignore. Argu­ing with her hus­band over it, she finally gives in to temp­ta­tion and pushes the but­ton. Noth­ing appears to happen.

    The next day, the stranger appears at the door. He hands them the money and col­lects the box. The wife asks him if it killed some­one when she pushed the but­ton, and he answers blandly, “Well, of course.”

    “Who?”

    He looks mildly sur­prised at her curios­ity. “Their name wouldn’t mean any­thing to you. It was some­one you didn’t even know.”

    She asks what hap­pens to the box now. Does it get thrown away?

    “Of course not. It’ll need to be re-set, nat­u­rally. But then it’ll be given to some­one else.”

    “Who? Some­one around here?”

    “Oh no,” he answers, turn­ing to give her a mean­ing­ful look as he closes the door. “It’ll go to some­one you don’t even know.”

    .
    And now, prov­ing that you can find ANY­thing online these days, I found a 10-minute distilled-down ver­sion of that episode on YouTube — HERE – if you want to check my mem­ory. I got a cou­ple words wrong, but on the whole, it’s just like I remem­bered it.

    Maybe it just seems like a bit of television-y frip­pery, but as I said, the point of it has stayed with me for over 20 years. Inter­est­ing, that.


    Related posts:

    1. Not giv­ing the poor our junk
    2. “See­ing the evil of a tech­no­log­i­cal society”
    3. “The Mind of the Maker” and the prob­lem of evil
    4. The com­mer­cials that are bug­ging me already

    August 17th, 2008 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • Mimi 08.17.2008

    I totally remem­ber that too — it had Rhea Perl­man in it, and it was, IIRC the new Twi­light Zone they ran in the 80s.

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