Christianity identifies seven deadly sins that any human being is prone to committing. These sins, which are also sometimes known as cardinal sins or capital vices, include pride, lust, wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy and greed. Amongst all these, greed is the one that is most common in our society. It doesn’t take much effort to commit, and being avaricious often leads to misdeeds such as theft and violence. We all commit a mistake every now and then, but to be blinded by such a desire to possess material things proves how much we have degraded.
Four friends attempt to conduct a social experiment where they decide to expose to the whole world the various choices people make in life. While certain choices are shaped by greed, others are governed by humanity. These young men provide random people an opportunity to choose between a bag of 100,000 dollars and the life of an innocent child.
The first experiment is carried out on a man sitting in the park with his girlfriend. One young man from the team walks up to the stranger, and requests him for a phone, saying he needs to make an urgent call. This of course is a ploy to obtain this stranger’s phone number. Within a few minutes, the man in the park gets a call, giving him instructions to tell his girlfriend that he will be back soon, then go to a tree and play a video on the tablet kept there. The video on the tablet shows three masked men holding a crying girl child. The stranger in the park is then asked to pick up a briefcase containing the money, and decide whether he wants to keep the cash or wishes to save the child’s life. Shockingly, this young man, who has the means to afford expensive things, chooses the cash and attempts to flee from the spot with his partner.
The same experiment is repeated, this time on a man lying in the park. Ironically, this man, who is probably not well-to-do, chooses exactly the opposite. He admits he needs the money, but declares that a human life is more important. This stranger rightly says, “Can’t put a price tag on human life”, proving that humanity still exists in our society. If you were given a choice between money and an innocent life, what would you do?
