I have written many posts on philosophy over the years, today however, I felt like taking a different approach to the old problem. Where do we fit in history ? Does the actions of a single individual really make a difference ? What about long after we’re dead ? Well… maybe we can calculate that using mathematics.
Of course, since I’m not writing a PHD paper here, I’ll be using a few (fair) assumptions, which can be questioned, but I believe that – for the vast majority of cases, my postulation will stand up to scrutiny.
So let’s first think of how we might calculate the actual impact a person may have had on history, as measured at any given point. Let’s call our hypothetical person: Sarah. How much impact did Sarah have on the world ? Well, one way to estimate that would be to find out, at any given moment: how many people alive right now wishes Sarah had never died (or if she’s still alive, that she’d remain so forever), call this value (A). Then, we subtract the number of people who wishes she had never been born (call this B). For most people – the values of both these would be at their highest either sometime during their lives when they do something most impactful – or right after their deaths. With each passing year, both A and B will decrease – as people die and forget, some will tell their children though – so the decrease isn’t absolute.
If we say that Y starts as A-B, and Time is X, then, since there is direct inverse proportion between X and Y (over time the number of people who have any opinion at all of Sarah’s life reduces) there is a very standard function that we can plot here: Y=1/X – the function for an inverse proportion. But this function, by itself, does not consider the case where B is bigger than A. That function has the starting value of Y as a negative amount. So we should plot that with the function:
Y=-1/X (which is the direct polar opposite graph).
So the graph of peoples impact on the world is pretty much always somewhere on these lines:
The Red line shows us the impact of a person who had a high starting value for A and a low starting value for B. The green line shows us a high B and a low A person.
If we use today as a the value of X, then right noow Ghandi and Nelson Mandela is probably right at the very top of the Red line at this moment. Hitler would be near the very bottom of the green line. George Busch and HF Verwoerd just a little higher on the same line.
With each passing day though – the lines get smaller, no matter how far away from zero your line starts – it always approaches it on a long enough timeline. Today – even though almost all of us still know the name of Alexander the Great, hardly anybody really has an opinion on whether we’re glad he lived anymore… yet a few of us do (historians mostly, trying to work out if his impact on history ultimately benefited mankind or not).
The point is though – for no life, no matter how big or small it starts out as – on this function – ever reaches zero. The only way that could happen, is if it starts at zero. Which is pretty much only possible if you were an orphan who became a hermit at the age of 6.
So your life has an impact that spreads throughout the entirety of history from the moment you were born onwards. The impact of your actions influences the world. The influence could be small or big, but it’s never non-existent. And over time, the impact dimishes, but it never goes away. Hitler may not be putting anybody in concentration camps anymore, but the fact that he once did radically changed the world and we still live in many of those changes.
Your life matters. If your life has a largely positive effect on the people around you – the remnants of that effect will last until the end of time, ditto if you had a largely negative effect.
We have very little opportunity to change the size of A and B (though we call get a few), but we sure can determine whether A is bigger than B or not… in other words, you can choose if your line in history is green or red – and the choice matters, because the line never, ever gets to zero.
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TeePOG