8B Protagonists

8 billion protagonists – Signore Galilei

8 billion protagonists

Let’s consider a person you don’t know. Maybe they live in the Republic of the Congo. Let’s say they’re near a city – not the country’s biggest city, but maybe its 5th biggest city. I don’t know that city’s name, but I could probably look it up. And they’re not in the city center, but rather 20 miles due east of its tallest building. Whoever happens to be closest to that exact point at the moment you’re reading this, that’s the single person we’re talking about.

I know extremely little about this person. I know they are probably Congolese, and therefore probably young and poor – maybe living on the equivalent of a few dollars a day. Maybe they speak English or French, but probably it’s not their first language.

But they are a unique person. They have a name, or will have one if they live through infancy, or there’s a reason they don’t have one. They have a full life story. Maybe they’ve saved someone’s life. Maybe they’re a child abuser. But they’ve smiled. They’ve cried. They want something – maybe their favorite meal, a new home, money, their neighbors to leave, or the salvation of their soul. And probably someone cares about them and would like them to stay alive.

Everyone is a person. That person in the Congo. You. Me. Your favorite author. Your favorite author’s cousin’s childhood best friend. The person born right before you were. The next person who will die of tuberculosis. There are over 8 billion of us, and the rounding error on that number could fill a dozen cities.

When people talk about millions or billions of people, it just seems like a vague large number. Over a million kids were saved by measles vaccines last year? Well that’s nice. 800 million people live in extreme poverty? That’s kinda sad – maybe someone should help them. There’s a recurring trope in pop science that your brain never evolved to think about so many people. Dunbar’s number says that you can only meaningfully connect with about 150 people at once, though some anthropologists think it might be as high as 300 or 400. But compare that to 8 billion. Your friend group is literally as small to the world as the blink of an eye is to a year.

I don’t think any of us can truly picture what 8 billion people means, or even a million. I can try to imagine 10 jam-packed stadiums, or the whole city of Austin, Texas, or a hundred buildings with a hundred rooms with a hundred people each. Even still, I can’t hold in my head a million lives as rich and detailed as my own, a million people who are each the main character of their own story.

But if you want to get even a small sense of how much empathy and compassion you should have for the world as a whole, it helps to think of a single person you’ll never meet. Because that’s who most of the world is, and that’s who you are to most of the world. And if we’re ever going to act like everyone matters, that’s where we need to start.

(And I did look it up: the 5th biggest city in the Republic of the Congo is Ouésso, near the country’s northern border, and its tallest building is a branch office of the Bank of Central African States. 20 miles east of it is a point in the jungle about 2 miles from a road used by a timber company, so maybe our specific example person is a logger driving on that road. Now you know.)

Top image: A worker digging a trench for a fiber-optic cable in Ouésso. By Wikola via Wikimedia Commons

Middle image: Ouésso at nightfall, via Wikimedia Commons

8B Protagonists

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