Just thinking about all the child-sex tourists who died in The Tsunami is enough to make me do a little jig. There’s a positive in every situation if you are prepared to look for it.
This seems to me rather close to the question of whether or not vigilantism is proper/good/necessary/justified.
Suppose that–in a given hypothetical act of terrorism or genocide-- it could be known with certainty that many, many more “bad” people would be killed than “good” ones. And further, therefore, the “positive” impact you mentioned above would obviously greatly outweigh the “negative” impact. In that case is genocide/terrorism justified? Who decides? Popular referendum?
Now go even further and take this thought experiment to its extreme. Consider a genocide that resulted in the smallest possible “negative” impact of only one, single, “good” person murdered along with a massive, “positive” impact of 2,000,000 “bad” people being killed. Now is it justified? These “negatives” and “positives” are simply value judgments, are they not? Who shall presume to judge the value of a human’s life?
And if it decided that these purges are justified, where does this leave us? Should we be collectively planning and undertaking “positive” genocides that aim to kill as many “bad” people as possible while sparing as many of the “good” as we can? Perhaps eugenics or forced sterilizations/abortions would be seen as more palatable?
So, what we need to be doing, is luring all the bad people into one spot, then taking them out of the equation? A cunning plan and one that has my approval. We just need to think of an event that only bad people would want to attend.
Isn’t this what Americans told themselves that they were doing in order to justify dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Not everyone that would be killed would be “bad,” but many more “bad” people would be killed and the lives of “good” people would be saved.
It’s amazing the things we can make ourselves believe about “the enemy.”
What happens when you realize that you are mostly interchangeable with your enemy and that you are on the side that you are on virtually by circumstance of birth?
Nowhere do I suggest that active measures be taken to purge undesirables. What I am saying is that very rarely to never does any one consider that people we would consider assholes, douchebags, and downright evil people are also victims of natural and man-made events that cause massive losses of life. The question is then, how much do we value the improvement from these people ceasing to exist versus the tragedy of losing the “good” people? The answer is, the loss of a single good person is (and should be) seen as orders of magnitude worse than the benefits of a single obliterated asshole. Our justice system is set up this way, because sending innocents to jail is worse than letting the guilty go free.
I"m puzzled, though, that you think we don’t place values on human life every day. As someone mentioned, that’s exactly what we do when we bomb or invade a country. The loss of a little Iraqi child is “worth it” to get the “bad people.” Insurance companies in the U. S. do this right now; they won’t spare any expense to save someone. Even the NHS (is that the right acronym) in the U.K. has to ration healthcare. Does the government spare no expense, pay any price, to save every life ? No, no country does that. There are calculated risks that no one wants to talk about but are nonetheless running in the background.
That’s actually a bit of a digression from my main point, though, which is that all losses of life are not unmitigated tragedies.
Have you run into the Monkeysphere yet? I don’t really care on a visceral level what happens to people a planet away from me, and that doesn’t make me a bad person (200,000 dead is a statistic - it makes me go, “Wow, that’s a lot of dead people!” but I didn’t know any of them, and I basically can’t even conceive of 200,000 dead people). I suppose you’re not supposed to say that you don’t really care what happens to people half a planet away, but I’m getting older and I’m starting to care less what people think of me.
Does thinking dark thoughts make a person “abnormal?” I doubt it. Acting on dark thoughts or having consistent dark thoughts which cause problems for you and those around you may be called “abnormal,” I suppose. Whatever abnormal means. (And I am less sure of that the longer I live.)
I think age has a way of producing a certain casual attitude about death, Cat Whisperer. It is, after all, both normal and natural to die. Both individually and through disasters man-made and natural.
I think Americans fear death more than a lot of other cultures. I’m reminded of a story in the paper about a man who was visiting in the Himmalayas who was distressed about his guides killing a bird for food. And they gutted it live.
When he expressed his concern for its suffering their response was not to worry, that it would be dead soon enough. Eekers. But probably a cultural attitude.
What is given to many people of certain years is an increased ability to speak their thoughts with less consideration of social pressure.
I think of the almost cultish attachment we can have to a single child who has been murdered and how socially correct or expected it is to go on at some length about it. I find that somewhat distasteful and even unsavory myself. We seem to do the same to a less passionate degree with mass murders.
Maybe the years give a person some perspective on death. You gather up the losses as you age and also face the increasing certainty of your own death. Certainly it makes sense that you would develop some measure of detachment from it all or go a bit bonkers.
“Nature is red in tooth and claw” and always has been/will be. We each need to make our peace with that cruel fact.
Human nature is no exception.
Now you’ve answered your question, file it away in your brain and use that answer when someone else comes up with this idea.
What a powerful and potentially life-changing bit of prose from the least likely of sources. It makes a lot of sense, though. The brain is finite, and it’s the source of all feelings, so it makes sense that the number of people we can conceptualize as people should have an upper limit. It does make a lot of the interactions among people make sense in retrospect.
A good next step is 1) more research on it, obviously, and 2). recognizing this as a key part of human existence. This, rather than go with the conceit that we’re some magical beings who have infinite capacity for compassion.
No one likes a pragmatist. For example if I were to suggest that we completely annihilate, say, the entire Middle East (including our friends), or North Korea, there’d be a lot of push-back.
Here’s one. My parents are Holocaust survivors and emigrated to the US after the war. So, if hadn’t been for unspeakable horrors that they lived through and massive destruction of life, not only wouldn’t I have been born, but I’d probably be living in a small town in Poland as a Hassidic Jew.
I really like the life I have here. How do I reconcile the tragedy with being happy in this place?
Distressing thoughts. We all get 'em.
That…makes perfect sense. A great example of that is the interactions between Dr. McCoy and Spock on Star Trek - Spock would say something matter-of-factly, and Dr. McCoy would go off on him about how he has no compassion and doesn’t care about people or the situation, etc., when Spock wasn’t making any value judgement, just stating the facts.
What do you do with this thought? Realize that a lot of other people had it too. IMO, there is no need to feel bad about it.
The social norm is to not speak ill of the dead. It serves a useful purpose both because it spares the survivors hearing about the faults of their vanished loved ones. It also saves us from appearing callous.
This is exactly the right kind place to express this sort of thing, assuming you don’t have a close relationship with someone who can hear you out. Hope you feel better.
Walt
Well, I’m sure most of those people weren’t big enough jerks to deserve getting killed by whatever disaster killed them.
I think what people find disturbing is that such massive and random devestation can happen so quickly without warning. You look at a city skyline and it seems massive and indestructable. The idea that at any moment, 100,000 people living there could be wiped out by a tsunami, earthquake or fireball from space is pretty horrifying.
It’s also usually considered impolite to attack people who cannot defend themselves.
I don’t see how wholesale annihilation would be the most practical solution. If we wipe them out with nuclear weapons, we have fallout in our newly-conquered, charred territory.
I’ve often thought that life is much more frightening than anything Stephen King can write. Yet there are many ways to transform that hideous fact and in a sense create something positive. Or at the least endurable.
The reality that at any moment I may breath my last breath can be used to make each moment worthwhile.
Now why is that also so easy to forget?