I read about a child being beaten to death over several hours by her own adoptive parents in the progressive rage thread. It made me sick, literally. Its this sort of shit that helped lead to my depression. I honestly wish I could become more detached from the world around me, as bad as that sounds.
There's 7+ billion people in the world and they are having every possible experience right now from the happiest to the saddest. The broadcast media highlights the saddest tales from around the world in realtime. You can be reading nothing but sad tales continuously if you want to.
Part of the problem is we evolved to live in fairly small close knit family groups of maybe 40-200 people, where you knew everyone and could influence things that you knew were going on. This is what our empathy / social wiring is built to cope with. With worldwide mass media and especially the internet you can know about many things which you can do nothing about, leaving you with the knowledge but no power to affect what you've heard about. This could leave you with a feeling of helplessness.
This would be a case where an adaptive trait (high empathy) becomes maladaptive due to a change in the environment (knowledge of all the problems in the world).
This is something that bothers me frequently, actually. I hate how people respond to tragic events in the modern day. I feel like people don't take a broad enough perspective on it, and I call people out on being callous and it makes me seem callous to them... it's something most people just don't seem to be able to wrap their heads around.
For instance: 9/11... I get really really pissed off on that date every year... and not because of the terrorist attack. I get pissed off because people think something was so special about that event. Because it gets all this commemoration and people get so incredibly motivated to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.
When on that same day, just the same as any other day, many many many other people globally died of starvation.
Yeah, I think it's sad when a relative handful of people die in a violent event, and it is certainly an unfair way for a life to end... but is it really more sad or unjust than someone who slowly and painfully starves to death because society refuses to share with them? Or someone who dies of horrible illness because of corporate greed? Even in war, we pay so much attention to the violent deaths of soldiers or innocent bystanders caught in crossfire... but the truth is destabilization kills many times more people in a war zone than actual violence. How many memorials are made to them? How many of them get anniversary moments of national silence?
But violence is flashy material that the media can easily sensationalize and it's easy for people to get behind supposed solutions that take zero thought. More security. More violence. Hunt those responsible. Be hunted in return. In the meantime, ignore those who suffer silently.
It's really hard for me to look at things this way, and then swallow the claims about high empathy coupled with mass media. I find people extremely callous and selective with their empathy, and usually invest it in issues that frighten them.
If it were up to me, I would forbid any special recognition of any event where people died. There are too many, none deserves to be singled out, and people only seem to get stupid about it anyway. It makes me ashamed of the human race to know that we responded to a single event that killed a handful of people by dumping trillions of dollars into causing more death, when those same resources could have been put into infrastructure and relief that could have saved millions of lives from causes of death that are 10x as large and consistent. Let those who know the deceased mourn and mobilize. Everyone else should have a moment of silence every single day to recognize that people are dying around the world for unjust reasons every second (more than half of them due to starvation), and that ritual should continue until it changes.
Author
Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9796087 times)