I keep thinking about how powerless I am to fix anything. The death toll's only risen since the initial publication of this article, and the blithe acceptance and rationalization of this injustice has only continued, as innocent individuals are abstracted as part of some collectively culpable abstraction. Is conscience the price for complacence in one’s comfort?
Poignant article, even if I'm late in commenting...
It is awful what is happening and likewise i feel powerless. This does not paralyze me though, I do what I can. I think the banality of evil has become a side effect of mass society. It is almost as if we... have become a drone culture where everything is becoming a simulacrum of itself. Most things, even atrocities, are too abstract to really be meaningful. As you implied, personal comfort is now primary and people can seemingly justify anything to preserve that. It truly is a testimony to the power of propaganda and perception management. I know several otherwise really good people who are defending this. It is astounding. This world in addition to being filled with too much deception... is way too consequentialist for my liking.
Also.. nothing is ever too late. Thanks for reading.
Is there anything one *can* do, apart from remaining eternally vigilant?
"It truly is a testimony to the power of propaganda and perception management. I know several otherwise really good people who are defending this."
It always takes conscious effort on my part to remember that their stance is derived from the information they've absorbed. Even apart from "defending" oneself, it's unnerving to me when people can easily dismiss something as "not their problem, not worth caring about" because it is not occurring to them personally. I've always thought that the "it's not me, it's not my family" line was about mass society's attempt to distance themselves from atrocities, prior to reading your post...
Stalin said it correctly. Three innocent bomb victims is a tragedy, tens of thousands are a statistic.
At this point, with a decades long tally of things like drone strikes, proxy wars, and biowarfare, the U.S. empire has probably overtaken Stalin's death count.
Indeed. Good point. Perhaps that is how people manage to psychologically distance themselves from the carnage.. and accountability. Reducing it to mere statistics. Thanks for reading
I keep thinking about how powerless I am to fix anything. The death toll's only risen since the initial publication of this article, and the blithe acceptance and rationalization of this injustice has only continued, as innocent individuals are abstracted as part of some collectively culpable abstraction. Is conscience the price for complacence in one’s comfort?
Poignant article, even if I'm late in commenting...
It is awful what is happening and likewise i feel powerless. This does not paralyze me though, I do what I can. I think the banality of evil has become a side effect of mass society. It is almost as if we... have become a drone culture where everything is becoming a simulacrum of itself. Most things, even atrocities, are too abstract to really be meaningful. As you implied, personal comfort is now primary and people can seemingly justify anything to preserve that. It truly is a testimony to the power of propaganda and perception management. I know several otherwise really good people who are defending this. It is astounding. This world in addition to being filled with too much deception... is way too consequentialist for my liking.
Also.. nothing is ever too late. Thanks for reading.
Is there anything one *can* do, apart from remaining eternally vigilant?
"It truly is a testimony to the power of propaganda and perception management. I know several otherwise really good people who are defending this."
It always takes conscious effort on my part to remember that their stance is derived from the information they've absorbed. Even apart from "defending" oneself, it's unnerving to me when people can easily dismiss something as "not their problem, not worth caring about" because it is not occurring to them personally. I've always thought that the "it's not me, it's not my family" line was about mass society's attempt to distance themselves from atrocities, prior to reading your post...
Stalin said it correctly. Three innocent bomb victims is a tragedy, tens of thousands are a statistic.
At this point, with a decades long tally of things like drone strikes, proxy wars, and biowarfare, the U.S. empire has probably overtaken Stalin's death count.
Indeed. Good point. Perhaps that is how people manage to psychologically distance themselves from the carnage.. and accountability. Reducing it to mere statistics. Thanks for reading