The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

See the mortality in everyone.
In 1665 a terrible plague roared through
London, killing close to 100,000 inhabitants. The writer Daniel Defoe
was only five years old at the time, but he witnessed the plague
firsthand and it left a lasting impression on him. Some sixty years
later, he decided to re-create the events in London that year through
the eyes of an older narrator, using his own memories, much research,
and the journal of his uncle, creating the book A Journal of the Plague
Year.
As the plague raged, the narrator of the book notices a peculiar
phenomenon: people tend to feel much greater levels of empathy
toward their fellow Londoners; the normal differences between them,
particularly over religious issues, vanish. “Here we may observe,” he
writes, “. . . that a near View of Death would soon reconcile Men of
good Principles, one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy
Scituation in Life, and our putting these Things far from us, that our
Breaches are fomented, ill blood continued. . . . Another Plague Year
would reconcile all these Differences, a close conversing with Death, or
with Diseases that threaten Death, would scum off the Gall from our
Tempers, remove the Animosities among us, and bring us to see with
differing Eyes.”
There are plenty of examples of what seems to be the opposite—
humans slaughtering thousands of fellow humans, often in war, with
the sight of such mass deaths not stimulating the slightest sense of

---

empathy. But in these cases, the slaughterers feel separate from those
they are killing, whom they have come to see as less than human and
under their power. With the plague, no one is spared, no matter their
wealth or station in life. Everyone is equally at risk. Feeling personally
vulnerable and seeing the vulnerability of everyone else, people’s
normal sense of difference and privilege is melted away, and an
uncommon generalized empathy emerges. This could be a natural state
of mind, if we could only envision the vulnerability and mortality of
others as not separate from our own.
With our philosophy, we want to manufacture the cleansing effect
that the plague has on our tribal tendencies and usual self-absorption.
We want to begin this on a smaller scale, by looking first at those
around us, in our home and our workplace, seeing and imagining their
deaths and noting how this can suddenly alter our perception of them.
As Schopenhauer wrote, “The deep pain that is felt at the death of
every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every
individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him or her
alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and inextricably lost.” We want to
see that uniqueness of the other person in the present, bringing out
those qualities we have taken for granted. We want to experience their
vulnerability to pain and death, not just our own.
We can take this meditation further. Let us look at the pedestrians
in any busy city and realize that in ninety years it is likely that none of
them will be alive, including us. Think of the millions and billions who
have already come and gone, buried and long forgotten, rich and poor
alike. Such thoughts make it hard to maintain our own sense of grand
importance, the feeling that we are special and that the pain we may
suffer is not the same as others’.
The more we can create this visceral connection to people through
our common mortality, the better we are able to handle human nature
in all its varieties with tolerance and grace. This does not mean we lose
our alertness to those who are dangerous and difficult. In fact, seeing
the mortality and vulnerability in even the nastiest individual can help
us cut them down to size and deal with them from a more neutral and
strategic space, not taking their nastiness personally.
In general, we can say that the specter of death is what impels us
toward our fellow humans and makes us avid for love. Death and love
are inextricably interconnected. The ultimate separation and

---

disintegration represented by death drive us to unite and integrate
ourselves with others. Our unique consciousness of death has created
our particular form of love. And through a deepening of our death
awareness we will only strengthen this impulse, and rid ourselves of
the divisions and lifeless separations that afflict humanity.