Remoteness & Abstraction: The Undoing of Humankind
Those are probably the best two words to ever describe the contemporary problem in simple terms.
Americans supports wars because we are shielded from the horror. The more intelligent among us know that our military often kills tens of thousands of innocent people. But we don't get a sense of it because we don't see the dead when they're frozen in their moment of horror. The numbers are abstract and the reality is remote from our awareness.
I'm just trying to express the fact that these two words are key to understanding the broad social dynamic, the fog of perception that perpetuates the horrors. If you would like me to elaborate, I'll try to do that.
And of course anything that makes the remote more local and the abstract more concrete are the antidotes to society gone mad.
