But once the jar has become a box, and particularly once the box shrinks from a huge pithos to become a small, portable pyxis, the element of compulsion is undeniable. Is there something in us which is drawn to doing the forbidden? Of course, or the story of Adam and Eve getting themselves booted out of the Garden of Eden wouldn’t resonate as it does. They have everything they could possibly want, and all they have to do to continue their paradisal existence is obey a single （arbitrary, snake-undermined） rule. But the lure of the prohibited is undeniable. If a phrase has come out of the Eve story to rival ‘Pandora’s box’， it is perhaps ‘forbidden fruit’。 It is not that the delicious fruit happens to be forbidden. It is that the fruit is delicious precisely because it is forbidden. The act of prohibition makes the withheld item more alluring than it could ever otherwise have been.
And this is surely even more true when we have been told, and believe, that the prohibition is for our own good. We spend our lives trying – consciously or subconsciously – to protect ourselves from harm. Most of us would never dream of sticking our hands into a flame, because we know it would hurt. But if a waiter wraps a cloth around his hand before placing a dish in front of us and warning us that it is hot, we are almost compelled to touch it. Why? Do we doubt the man? Are we testing whether his judgement of heat tallies with our own? Are we trying to prove to him or to ourselves that our hands are made of sufficiently asbestos-like material for the pain not to hurt? Why wouldn’t we simply take his word for it and look after ourselves, the way we do most of the time? Who tests the unknown heat of an object with their skin? It is an undeniably perverse response. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I know I have never in my life wanted to eat anything so much as a sachet of silica gel, on which someone has stamped the words ‘Do Not Eat’。
This compulsion is sufficiently widespread to have become a film and television trope in its own right. Perhaps the purest example is a 1986 episode of The Twilight Zone, called ‘Button, Button’， based on a story by Richard Matheson from 1970, and remade in 2009 as a feature film, The Box. Norma and Arthur live in an apartment and are beset by money worries. One day, a mysterious box is delivered with a button on top, and a note saying that a Mr Steward will visit them. Steward arrives when Arthur is absent （are we meant to think of him as Epimetheus, carelessly ignoring the warning of the note?） and tells Norma the deal. If she and Arthur press the button, they’ll receive $200,000. But – and it wouldn’t be The Twilight Zone without a catch – someone they don’t know will die. The couple discuss the proposition: is every life as important as every other? It could be someone who is already dying of cancer, it could be a peasant whose life is wretched. Or, Arthur says, it could be an innocent child. And almost as difficult for them to comprehend as the ethics are the physics of the deal. They open the box, and discover no mechanism within. No one would know if they had pressed the button or not. Arthur throws the box out, but Norma retrieves it. Eventually, the temptation is too great for her, and she presses the button. Like Hawthorne’s version of Epimetheus, her husband doesn’t stop her, but is upset just the same. The next day, Steward arrives with a briefcase containing the promised money. He removes the box and explains that it will be reprogrammed and offered to someone they don’t know. The sting in the tail is never spelled out more explicitly than that, but we are presumably meant to infer that Norma’s life now depends on the choice made by the next recipient of the box. An ungenerous person might wonder if Arthur has done quite well out of this exchange, since he will presumably get to keep the cash and might lose a wife who has already provoked in him a visibly angry response. Maybe he won’t even miss her.
Like so many Twilight Zone episodes, the story interrogates the darker side of human nature: what would you do if you were desperate? Or not even desperate, but just poor and getting poorer? How much do you value the lives of people you don’t know? We might think we would respond differently to the offer, but we all ignore the traumas of strangers every time we watch the news. How else could we survive? We can’t care as much about every single person alive as we do for our loved ones. And there is an ethical difference – isn’t there? – between ignoring a stranger who needs help, or money, or a kidney, and actively killing them. Neglect isn’t the same as animus. But to the person on the receiving end of no help （no medicine, no food, no kidney）， the death they face is awfully similar to the one they would face if you deliberately assassinated them.