What Can Be Mastered
“Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE REBEL
Near the end of The Rebel, Camus writes some of the most level-headed sentences ever offered about improving the world. Master in yourself what should be mastered. Rectify in creation what can be rectified. And when all of it is done, children will still die unjustly, even in a perfect society. Our greatest effort can only diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.
Two illusions die in this passage, and both deserve to. The first is the utopian illusion, the belief that some final arrangement of society will abolish suffering once and for all. Camus watched what that belief costs. Whoever promises everything feels entitled to demand everything, and real people get sacrificed to the geometry of the dream. The second illusion is despair, the belief that because we cannot fix everything, nothing we do counts.
Arithmetic is the humble middle ground. It works by addition and subtraction, one unit at a time. It never promises the total, and it never delivers nothing. A meal cooked, a debt forgiven, an evening of loneliness subtracted from someone’s week. None of it changes the human condition. All of it changes someone’s Tuesday, and Tuesdays are where lives actually happen.
Today, diminish the sufferings of the world by exactly one. Visit one person, mend one quarrel, fix one thing you broke. Refuse to despise the smallness of it. Small is what honest change looks like.
