Lex Fridman on Why You Should Read Albert Camus’ "The Plague"

The virus thing just made me think. Like I was talking to my dad a lot about my grandfather and just brought it, it made it so real to me because I studied World War II a lot. Especially the Holocaust and all that. But like the fact that just learning about my grandfather just made it so real to me. It kind of connected everything together. Plus there's a book I recommend people read is by Albert Camus called The Plague that he wrote right after World War II. I don't know if he is, he's like an existentialist philosopher. Existentialists believe that you have to live, like life is absurd, life is suffering. And there's no meaning to it all. You just have to live the moment and take each moment as it comes and live it to the fullest kind of idea. He described this town that got overtaken by the plague in the book The Plague. And that kind of similar to bubonic plague, basically similar characteristics. And writes about how everybody reacts in different ways. The main character is a doctor who basically sees the absurdity of the suffering around him. That there's no meaning to it all. That's the thing about the virus. There's Nazis and with wars there's an enemy. You can kind of trace back and understand what was happening. When the virus just seems like it comes out of nowhere. And it breaks the spine of the way we think of regular life. Some people try to cling on to regular life as if nothing is happening. Which by the way, it's kind of like what a lot of our society is doing right now. We're not yet, we haven't really felt the pain yet. And hopefully we won't. But there's this kind of calm before the storm kind of period. And then some people become more religious. They start to search for the bigger meaning of life outside of the material possessions. And then the doctor represents the idea that no matter what he gives himself fully to his craft of helping other human beings. And overall there's this story that, this idea that suffering is just part of life. And the only way, there's a natural temptation when there's cruelty and suffering all around you to isolate yourself. And to withdraw from life. Because anything you do in life is going to lead to suffering. You know, dating, like if you get married it's going to lead to suffering. Because eventually you're going to lose the people you love. So there's a natural desire to withdraw. But in fact what he found, the doctrine, what he saw around him is that love and compassion, like giving yourself fully to the love of other human beings and to his community is the only way to deal with that kind of suffering. To me it's a really profound story about love being the right response in a time of crisis. And a crisis that hits everybody. You want to kind of hide from it, but it's actually where more suffering happens. So it's a kind of profound book that I recommend people read. Most people have read like him in high school for this book called The Stranger. But that one in particular seems so connected to us. Oh sorry, he wrote it as an allegory for World War II. So the plague in that case is the Nazis. That it just hits out of nowhere. His book was really popular in 1947 he wrote it. As a kind of allegory of World War II. A way to talk about the virus that first infects the rats and then infects the weaker humans and then infects everybody. It was a connection and an allegory analogy to the Nazis. And so I saw the connection between now and the Nazis. Of course the scale there with World War II was much more intense. And finally just how like fragile this whole damn thing is. Like that my grandfather had probably a single digit percentage chance of living. You know like most people died. Most soldiers died. Especially in those early years of 1941 when the Nazis. Basically Stalin was using Russian soldiers and just human beings as human shields. Yeah just threw bodies at the problem. So the fact that my grandfather survived seems crazy. And I do all these things. I'm here talking to you, wearing a stupid tie. Like all of that is connected to like he somehow survived. Like all those little ripple effects. Me doing research. You know I hope to impact like billions of people one day. You know those little ripple effects. Like how fortunate I am to be part of that. I mean it just all seemed to be connected to me.