I see young people increasingly encouraged to press any and all big red buttons available to them, under the guise of “desperate times call for desperate measures” and I despair. Today, we increasingly have more and more big red buttons, and The Discourse increasingly has less and less nuance.

In the end, the hero learns that big red buttons, far from solving their problems, only ever serve to teach them that their understanding of the world is flawed. There is the age old saying that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The idea has also been taught in stories throughout the ages: any time a genie grants the hero’s three wishes, things always turn out differently than the hero had hoped. We’re going to give you some incredibly difficult and tempting poll questions, each of which has its pros and cons. Will you press the button is a game about decisions. The lesson that it’s a bad idea to circumvent the normal development of ideas in order to implement some sweeping change that is “obviously good” has been instilled in us from birth. By Opinion Stage Updated: September 26, 2021. Because I don’t know what the second order effects of such a massive change would be - society could quite easily end up worse than it is now. Even if the big red button did something obviously good like “end homelessness,” I would still not press it. In fact, I would not press the big red button even if it did way less than change all of society. If you could press a big red button and instantly change society into exactly what you believe it should look like, would you press it?

Press the big red button