Camus wrote this in 1946, in a series of essays for the newspaper Combat called “Neither Victims Nor Executioners.” Europe was just out of the war. The Cold War was beginning. The ideologies of the century were lining up to demand consent to murder for some grand purpose. Camus was asking, simply, for people to stop and think.

The demand is more modest than it sounds, and more difficult. He is not asking for purity. He is not asking for action. He is asking for a pause. In a world full of justifications for killing, for cruelty, for the deaths required by the project of the moment, he is asking that we agree to reflect before we consent. That we name the murder as murder.

The choice that follows is a separate matter. He knew that even reflective people would find themselves on different sides. But the demand for reflection itself is the first act of revolt, because the engine of mass murder always depends on people not stopping to think. The machinery runs on consent given without examination.

This applies past the politics of his moment. Every day, you are asked to consent to small harms by not naming them. Today, in some corner of your life, reflect. Name what you are being asked to accept. Then decide. The reflection itself, before any conclusion, is already a refusal to be carried along.