When it comes to survival, cooperation is usually the best policy

ILLUSTRATIONS: SILVIA STECHER

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said: ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’, or ‘Hell is other people’. This pithy phrase has often been misinterpreted as meaning that it’s horrible to be around others. Yet the line, from Sartre’s existentialist drama Huis Clos (No Exit), has a different meaning. Characters Inez, Garcin and Estelle are stuck in one room, facing the stifling judgment (what Sartre called ‘The Look’) of one another. Yet they must use this evaluation as a mirror to work out who they are. It’s being confronted by this new perspective on themselves that makes the characters’ situation truly hellish.

If you’ve ever felt that a well-meaning action has been misunderstood by a friend, you might recognise Sartre’s line of thought. One way of looking at the world might be to say that human beings are partly defined by their relationships with others as well as by the one they have with themselves. For example, a person might change how they express kindness depending on the recipient. They might support one downhearted friend with regular chatty phone calls, while with another, they opt to tag along on dog-walking duty. No matter how you look at it, though, we need the existence of other people to be kind.