Doing Nice Things is Demonic

Social media is the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli and must be fed a constant stream of human sacrifices. How would we even know if we were alive if we didn’t see arterial blood spurting across our screens? Today’s heart was ripped out of the chest of a certain MrBeast (although he’ll probably survive). Born Jimmy Donaldson, MrBeast is a crazy popular YouTuber with 131 million subscribers who feeds them a steady stream of stunts and nonsense (one video had him counting to 100,000—I’m not kidding—and it’s weirdly mesmerizing).

As he’s gotten more popular, his stunts have often focused on giving money to folks, out of kindness and clicks. This generosity had to be punished.

Enter BuzzFeed with an article outlining the “controversy” over MrBeast’s latest stunt: helping blind people not be blind. The fiend!

The young monster (Donaldson is 24) discovered that a lot of blindness can be fixed with a simple operation. MrBeast decided to give 1,000 people the gift of vision, and then put the video up on YouTube: “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time.” To nobody’s surprise, the reactions are joyful. “Oh man! No cloudiness, no blurriness!” “Oh it’s perfect! I can see everything!”

So what’s the crime?

“On Twitter, there were a number of negative responses.” Of course, there were. Well played BuzzFeed, you’ve succeeded in making curing the blind a sin. Jesus is lucky you weren’t around when he was healing lepers. “Water to wine, Jesus? Sounds like you’re enabling alcoholics!”

BuzzFeed even found someone who thought it smelled of Satan.

Lolo @LolOverruled

There is something so demonic about this and I can’t even articulate what it is

Demonic.

Others said he was doing charity porn. (This is a much-needed channel that YouPorn should consider. “Yeah baby, helping the homeless drives me crazy!”)

It’s also making MrBeast money! Heaven forbid a guy profits from advertising his good works. He’s supposed to earn his rent money questioning privilege or selling patriotic pillows.

But wait, there’s more!

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of MrBeast to varying degrees. The New York Times reported that he has berated his employees. He made anti-gay jokes on Twitter as recently as 2017, and he’s a young and powerful business owner who idolizes Elon Musk. And, of course, there’s the question of his intentions when creating stunt philanthropy content. 

So he’s a boss who has yelled at his staff? A fascist! He likes Elon Musk? A Nazi!

And anti-gay jokes “as recently as 2017”! You can hear the collective gasp of prudish horror from the BuzzFeed staff. 2017? Why that was only SIX YEARS AGO! When MrBeast was, um, eighteen years old.

Blaming an 18-year-old for awful jokes is pretty sad but let’s see what BuzzFeed dug up. (It’s always good to find the actual words targeted in one of these digital witch hunts.) Ah, it’s a link to a 2018 Atlantic article by Taylor Lorenz,¹ “‘YouTube's Biggest Philanthropist’ Has a History of Homophobic Comments.” Like? “Windows is gay” (2015). “I don’t have a printer, fag” (2016). And “STFU fag” (2017).

That a teenager used slurs in a way that was common to teenagers (and not necessarily meant homophobically) is unfortunate but not surprising. Teenagers like to shock. To hold up six-year-old tweets as proof that MrBeast is a homophobe is playing pretty damn dirty pool.

Ok, maybe you still aren’t convinced that MrBeast is Beelzebub’s younger brother. What do you say to GENOCIDE?!?

That’s right. MrBeast wants to eliminate blind people.

Another huge problem: MrBeast's video seems to regard disability as something that needs to be solved. He doesn't say in the video or in any of his subsequent public statements whether he consulted with the video's subjects about how they felt to have their disability treated as a problem.

“Huge” problem. Huge. Like the Black Plague, Attila the Hun, or gas stoves. And BuzzFeed thinks the problem isn’t that people are blind, but that MrBeast thinks people being blind is bad. How dare he problematize blindness!

Steven Aquino (he/him) @steven_aquino

If you wanna see a microcosm of how the ableist mindset pervades society writ large, check out the replies to Mr. Beast’s tweet on disabled people being ROIs. They essentially say disabilities are a failure of the human condition and thus require eradication.

Exactly. By helping people to see he’s eradicated them. Makes massive sense. Note the 10 “likes.” BuzzFeed had to dig deep to find this level of nonsense.

Do we as a society see disabilities as problems that need to be solved?

Yes, because they are! If we can help the blind to see and the lame to walk, that’s a good thing! Believing otherwise is madness. BuzzFeed thinking any of this dreck was worth writing is the real problem that needs to be solved.

BuzzFeed wraps up:

Should videos like this not exist, or should they not have to exist?

I don’t know, but I hate it here. 

I think here is generally pretty nice.² It’s better than the alternative. BuzzFeed, however, I might learn to hate.

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EDIT P.S. Just to prove BuzzFeed is not alone in idiocy, after I wrote this essay, TechCrunch published an even dumber article on MrBeast’s stunt, “MrBeast’s blindness video puts systemic ableism on display.”

In the broadest lens, the biggest problem with wanting to “cure” blindness is that it reinforces a moral superiority of sorts by those without disabilities over those who are disabled. Although not confronted nearly as often as racism and sexism, systemic ableism is pervasive through all parts of society. The fact of the matter is that the majority of abled people view disability as a failure of the human condition; as such, people with disabilities should be mourned and pitied. More pointedly, as MrBeast stated in his video’s thumbnail, disabilities should be eradicated — cured.

Being cured is a bad thing? Someone please cure the pounding headache this article gave me.

1. I’ve never met Taylor Lorenz, but according to Reason magazine she popularized the term “Ok, Boomer,” so she’s on my naughty list.

2. Except for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which actually are demonic.