Mandarin button  

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The mandarin button is a metaphor often attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who is said to have invented it to examine the roots of moral behavior of the individual. Rousseau asks his reader how he would act if he could by a simple act of will, without leaving Paris and never be suspected, kill an old mandarin living in Beijing and whose death would bring him some benefit.

In reality, this metaphor was attributed to Rousseau by Honore de Balzac in his novel Father Goriot. Balzac puts the following words in the mouth of Eugène de Rastignac :

As-tu lu Rousseau ? […] Te souviens-tu de ce passage où il demande à son lecteur ce qu'il ferait au cas où il pourrait s'enrichir en tuant à la Chine par sa seule volonté un vieux mandarin, sans bouger de Paris ?

Have you read Rousseau? [...] Do you remember that part where he asks his reader what he would do if he could get rich by killing in China by his will alone an old mandarin, without moving from Paris? --tr. JWG

But it seems that Balzac had in fact borrowed from Chateaubriand in Genius of Christianity:

O conscience ! ne serais-tu qu'un fantôme de l'imagination, ou la peur des châtiments des hommes ? je m'interroge ; je me fais cette question : “Si tu pouvais par un seul désir, tuer un homme à la Chine et hériter de sa fortune en Europe, avec la conviction surnaturelle qu'on n'en saurait jamais rien, consentirais-tu à former ce désir ?”

O conscience! could you be but a ghost of the imagination, or the fear of punishment by men? I wonder, I ask myself this question: "If you could by simply desiring it, kill a man in China and inherit his fortune in Europe, with the supernatural conviction that no one would ever know, would you consent to forming this desire?" --tr. JWG

Sigmund Freud in turn cites it in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death to analyze the unconscious motivations that can push an individual to accept, and even participate in, the horrors of war:

In his novel, Père Goriot, Balzac refers to a place in the works of J. J. Rousseau where this author asks the reader what he would do if, without leaving Paris and, of course, without being discovered, he could kill an old mandarin in Peking, with great profit to himself, by a mere act of the will. He makes it possible for us to guess that he does not consider the life of this dignitary very secure. "To kill your mandarin" has become proverbial for this secret readiness to kill, even on the part of people of today.[1]

Richard Matheson was probably inspired by the metaphor when in 1970 he wrote the short story "Button, Button", adapted in 1986 as an episode of The Twilight Zone, and a film, The Box, in 2009.

Analysis

The reason people may want to push the button stems from anemotional detachment, the psychopathic lack of remorse, which stems from the physical distance.

References

• Curiosities of the Self: Illusions We Have about Ourselves (1965) by Theodor Reik
• The Hypothetical Mandarin : Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain by Eric Hayot
• "To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance" by Carlo Ginzburg in Wooden Eyes

See also

• Deterrence
• Milgram experiment
• Empathy
• Ethical dilemma
• Push-button