Instead of Killing
“Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE REBEL
This sentence comes near the close of The Rebel, in the section called “Thought at the Meridian.” Camus has spent the book mapping the ways revolt goes wrong, how the desire to produce a perfect being, a new man, a redeemed humanity, has justified more murder than ordinary tyranny ever did. The pattern is always the same. We kill, or we accept the killing of others, in order to bring into being a humanity that does not yet exist. The body count in the present is a payment for the imagined glory ahead.
Camus rejects the trade. The rebel he respects does not aim at a future humanity he must purify the world to produce. He aims at present humanity, the actual one, in all its mixedness, and tries to let it live. Not to kill in its name, even with the cleanest cause. Not to die for an abstraction either. To live, and to let live, in the company of others doing the same. From that practice, Camus says, we create what we actually are.
This applies in smaller arenas. The parent constantly correcting the child toward a perfect version. The partner trying to remake the other into the ideal. The reformer who can only love the people who agree with him. In each case, the work is to stop killing the actual to produce the ideal. Live with what is here. Let it live with you. That is how something real grows.
