- Extreme endurance feats and challenges (counting to 100,000, reading the entire dictionary, spending 50 hours in Antarctica, spinning a fidget spinner for an entire day, being buried alive, starving himself for 30 days, completing a marathon in comically oversized shoes, eating a really big slice of pizza)
- A lot of what I would classify as “labor-intensive stupidity” (filling a friend’s house with a million Legos or tons of green slime, dropping a car from a helicopter into a pool of Orbeez, crashing a train into a brick wall, having a hundred people in dinosaur costumes walk into a store)
MrBeast insists in interviews that the main goal of all of this is simply to help people and make positive change in the world. In the authorized documentary on his rise to fame, MrBeast says he just loves the feeling that comes from changing lives. When he handed a stranger thousands of dollars, “a lot of them just broke down in tears in front of me.” A pizza delivery guy who received one of MrBeast’s mega-huge tips was profusely thankful, telling him “I just got to spend the rest of the day with my kid because you gave me money and it allowed me to take the day off.”
MrBeast has therefore tried to target many of his giant cash donations to those who actually need them. He has given away a million dollars in food to people in need, given tens of thousands of dollars to people who lost their jobs during the pandemic, bought all of the food in a grocery store to give it to a food bank, filled five buses with school supplies for poor schools, given millions to Ukrainian refugees, built houses for homeless families, rebuilt tornado survivors’ homes, and planted 20 million trees.
The latest MrBeast philanthropy video, “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time,” has attracted some controversy. In it, he pays for thousands of sight-restoring surgeries for vision-impaired people around the world, and documents their reactions as they see the world with clear vision for the first time. (He also gives some of them stacks of cash, and gives one young man a brand new Tesla. One patient peels off the bandages and the first thing he sees is a sign that reads “You Just Won $10,000.”) Some viewers called the video “demonic” and “exploitative.” (...)
But MrBeast has a defense of what he does: Would he be a better person if he didn’t cure the blind and donate to food banks? If he stuck to paying people to cover themselves in snakes, would he be less controversial? The people whose surgeries he paid for seem genuinely overwhelmed with gratitude, and it is clear he has changed their lives. One might argue that if he’s going to pay for surgeries, he shouldn’t do videos about it, because this kind of “inspiration porn” essentially coerces people with disabilities (since who is going to be able to turn down a sight-restoring operation?) into appearing on YouTube and uses them for clicks. MrBeast would likely counter by saying that his video has raised both awareness and money, and that people are going to have their sight restored who would not be able to see if the video hadn’t caused the public to donate the funds. One irate Beast-defender said “Go ahead and cancel him, that’s 1000 people that wouldn’t get a life-changing surgery they can’t afford.”
I think we can better understand the problem with MrBeast, however, if we don’t focus so much on MrBeast himself. In fact, the person who called MrBeast’s video “demonic” said exactly that: Beast himself was merely “fascinating and bizarre”; what was disturbing was a video whose core message was: “a single rich guy paid for life-changing surgery for us, and it’s easy to do this.” Another critic pointed out that the real problem was “the dystopian thought [that] we’re reliant on YouTube videos instead of competent government for assistance,” and we “can never again untangle acts of kindness from brand-building.” As Hasan Piker explained, the problem with the video is less with MrBeast paying for the surgeries than with the fact that a quick, easy surgery isn’t accessible to people in the first place and so they’re getting it through a MrBeast video:
“You watch this video and go, ‘Aww, how cute and how nice.’ I watch this video and I’m filled with rage that we shut off access to a ten-minute procedure because we paywalled it and decided that like some people just simply can’t get it. It is so insanely frustrating that it’s up to like one YouTube guy to decide to make content out of it, that people who are too poor can’t just fucking see.” (...)
It’s nice that MrBeast plants trees and donates to food banks. Plenty of the super-rich use less of their wealth to fund good works, so targeting him in particular can seem a little harsh. (However, I don’t mean to single him out for criticism; I’ve previously written about lots of other terrible rich people.) But he could do a great deal more good if, when trying to change lives, he gave some indication that he understood the basic concept of justice. As it is right now, it seems like the only thing he knows is that when he hands a giant roll of hundred dollar bills to someone, they become overjoyed, and he likes the feeling he gets when they tell him how wonderful he is and how much he has done for them. MrBeast could actually have done a video on blindness that would have avoided controversy if he had demonstrated some of the anger that Hasan Piker had about how it’s absurd that MrBeast even has to do this. He could have not just advocated that people in the audience give money, but encouraged them to think seriously about the fact that this problem could easily cease to exist with a few tweaks to the healthcare financing system. I realize it may be too much to expect from a 24-year-old YouTube bro who just enjoys playing Willy Wonka, showering golden tickets (blindness cures, bricks of cash, Teslas) on random people. But I am willing to take MrBeast at his word when he says he wants to give away his money and help people, and I believe it’s possible for him to undergo moral and political self-education that will make him a better advocate for the causes he says he cares about.
So while I’m tempted to say “the problem isn’t MrBeast himself, it’s the economic system that lets people become so desperate they need MrBeast in order to take a day off and see their kid,” and I do think that’s true, MrBeast himself is also grotesque. In his videos, he relishes the power that unlimited wealth gives him. Sometimes he uses this to change lives, but sometimes he will only give people the money if they first swim with sharks. The competitions mostly seem pretty harmless, if often unpleasant (staying in a small circle for 100 days to win $500,000), but it’s clear that part of the reason people are willing to undergo whatever challenges MrBeast sets is that money has the power to completely change people’s lives. In a world where everybody was doing fine economically, maybe there wouldn’t be anything objectionable about offering people a reward to participate in some televised challenge, but in this world, where nearly half of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency expense, a lot of people are going to be grasping for MrBeast’s largesse because they need it. (...)
I do think, however, that there is something fundamentally tawdry about MrBeast’s money obsession. The videos I like most are the ones where he does a complicated and cool thing like building a giant Lego tower. The videos I like least involve simply going up to people and handing them wodges of cash, not just because it conflicts with my notions of distributional justice, but because it’s lazy, taking advantage of the fact that just having a bunch of money gives you an immense amount of power in our world. Yes, it means you can get people to do things like sit in a big bucket of ramen noodles for hours. But the side of humanity that will eat worms for money is not the side we should be encouraging, because these scenarios are, at worst, exploitative and, at best, extremely stupid.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: MrBeast/uncredited
[ed. Links galore (if you're into this sort of thing). I've only been peripherally aware of this guy and glad I didn't waste my time finding out more.]
