Saturday, November 28, 2015

People are generous in person. We are cruel at a distance. Drivers  behave as they would not dream of behaving face to face. Remote killers cheerfully wipe out their victims as though it were nothing but a video-game.We are complicit. Our standard of living may come at the expense of others or it may not: in either case, they are excluded, have nothing to lose. So they kill themselves in protest and take some of us with them. We are happy to interpret this as a kind of cult-madness. It may be. But people with something to lose don’t kill themselves. We prefer not to consider this, and to think of these Others as crazy and evil. Maybe they are, but how did they get that way? Do we have anything to do with it? does the international system that favors make them hopeless?