This past weekend, popular youtuber and regular philanthropist MrBeast dropped this video. In this video, MrBeast and his team help 1000 people by financing a small operation that drastically improves their sight. This is a 10 minute procedure that is more or less free (or very affordable) in modern countries like The Netherlands, where I live. In third world countries, which unfortunately includes the United States in this category, this operation can often be unaffordable for people. The people will end up having to live with really bad eyesight for most, if not all of their lives just because this operation is locked behind a paywall.
When I first decided to talk about this topic for the week, I had just watched the video and I had a mostly positive vibe in my head. Now that a few days have passed and I’ve seen some of the responses to this video, my faith in humanity has been damaged once more. It turns out there are a lot of people who did not think that healing a thousand people for free for a youtube video was a good thing. There’s a point they’re trying to make that I think could be valid to an extent if it’s explained well, but some of these people making the argument are deranged in my opinion. So let’s talk a little bit about the way the world works and why it’s apparently up to rich youtubers to solve the problems that the government doesn’t want to deal with.
Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately. You shouldn’t have to broadcast your charity efforts for it to be a good deed. Bragging about it in general is probably not a great look. My guess is that this is where people’s issue with the problem stems from. If you’re doing charity, that’s not something to brag about. That is fair. What isn’t fair, is judging a content creator for creating content. MrBeast is in a unique position here. He makes a lot of money from his videos because he’s highly popular. What he does, and this is what he’s known for, is reinvest the money he makes into his videos. That’s how he got to go from the guy who counts to 10.000 to the guy who built an entire chocolate factory. If your money comes from your content, then making content out of helping people isn’t a bad thing. I have full faith that the money made from this video will go towards this or a different philanthropic act.
One thing that I talked about earlier, and is also mentioned by popular streamer Hasanabi, is the insanity of the situation. This ten minute procedure is too expensive for so many people whose life can be drastically improved by it. That’s the part of the video that you should be angry about. Not the fact that MrBeast is making content out of life changing help he’s providing to random folks across the world, but the fact that he feels like he has to step it up and do it, where the governments don’t.
As someone who has an eye disease, and whose brother has a much worse variant of this eye disease, I think it’s amazing that MrBeast is giving people this opportunity. If mine or my brother’s eye disease could be cured and we had to be in a video for twenty seconds that would be an amazing deal. Are you kidding me? Even with socialized health care it still costs money to deal with diseases like this. And he even gives some people a car and extra money to spice up the video! I wouldn’t be surprised if appearing in the video is an opt-in situation. I have no sources for this, but I would not be shocked if the people gave permission to appear in the video. I doubt a single one of them thinks the outrage that people on the internet are fabricating is necessary.
And that leaves me with answering the question I posed at the start of all of this:
Why aren’t there more superheroes? I think about this a lot actually, probably too much. If I were to be a billionaire, the coolest thing I could think of doing is going around and changing people’s lives forever. Kind of like MrBeast is doing for some people. Why don’t Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk do these kinds of things? Well, my answer to this question is pretty simple. You need to be a ruthless person to become a billionaire. The type of person that wants to do good is unlikely to make it that far. It’s not impossible, but as we talk about a lot on this blog lately, the final villain is always capitalism.
Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 