If you’re a normal human being with a more or less normal relationship with your parents, you should answer no to this question:

“Would you let me kill your parents for €1,000?”

If I carry on and say:

“What about 1 million?”

And then keep raising the stakes, you’ll end up telling me something like:

“No, not for all the money in the world.”

There are 3 reasons for that.

• These are people you know and love, in a very concrete situation;
• The sums, on the other hand, aren’t concrete, because you know you’re in a thought experiment;
• This is the much-studied¹ case of extreme rhetoric, which leaves no room for nuance.

Now imagine that, instead of that conversation, I’d offered you €1,000, and in exchange someone you don’t know, have never seen, and will never have the slightest connection with (nor with anyone close to them) dies.

You’d probably say no.

But for 100,000, a million, ten million and so on: at what point do you say yes?
The first barrier has just fallen, but not the others.

An example that clears all 3 is told in the French series D’argent et de sang [Of Money and Blood], about the carbon tax scam.

The fraudsters are on a plane, and offer a member of the crew money to eat a banana, skin and all. The steward turns down €1,000, then €5,000… then accepts at €10,000. According to one of the real protagonists, it was €30,000, during a game of poker.

Either way: the steward had a limit. And it was broken because this wasn’t a thought experiment, but something to do in exchange for a concrete sum, laid on the table in front of him.

That’s why you can’t run a realistic poll on questions with real stakes:

• For reason 2, described above;
• Because polls are declarative, and therefore, by definition, wrong.

People say what they think they ought to say, what they think they ought to do, or what they think others expect to hear.

Everyone wants to save the planet.
Everyone says they want to shop green.
Everyone thinks locally made beats Shein.

But everyone keeps eating meat, driving their car, living in a badly insulated house and buying Chinese clothes made in atrocious conditions.

So everyone, indirectly, puts a price on life.
On their own, but above all on other people’s.