The other thing is how many people there are, that idea of visualizing everyone as a huge ball of meat compared to the Earth. But just to point out about being special when there are billions.
You doing ok? I embrace my cosmic insignificance for sure but it's more freeing to me that I don't have to measure myself by anyone's standards (within reason) except my own and those who I love vs to remind myself that I'm just going to be less than a blip in the timeline.
But I can get the overview effect looking at the stars/unplug from the system I know I sound like a crackpot. System being the 9-5 standard life, I want to not have a job/be retired I guess (although I would do what I want to do full time eg. work on robotics hobby).
I mostly mean hard to empathize when the pain is not in your face like watching combat footage of what's happening in Ukraine. People shooting themselves in the head instead of waiting for the grenade to drop from the drone and mangle them. Other stuff to watch Cartel videos just brutal stuff damn, separates animal from civilization/higher mind when you experience trauma like that.
I might just be jaded from reading the news everyday time to go back into the sand.
If you’ve spend years struggling to survive, starving and wasting away in a walled ghetto, and now you’re standing by a pit, facing armed soldiers intent on killing you… would you really have the will to run? Would you, weakened by hunger, even feel like you could run? Would you get very far if you tried? Would you want to fight to keep on living if life felt that hopeless?
I wonder if anyone asking why has ever been so hungry that moving is an effort. Have they ever been injured so badly, or fallen so ill, that just lying down and dying feels preferable to taking one more step.
Trying to resist under those circumstances would be unthinkable. Quite literally! These systems are setup to instil exactly this behaviour!
Frankly, this reeks of victim-blaming and shows a real lack of imagination for what has gone on in the world that you don't know about.
For instance, they'd take a prisoner out, film the prologue to an execution video, unsheathe a knife or rack a shotgun, and then... they wouldn't perform the execution itself. "It's just for show," they'd tell their target, as they return him to his cell. Then, one day, after calmly filming yet another prologue, they'd swiftly and gruesomely execute their prisoner, who had been lulled into a certain docility and wasn't expecting them to actually go through with it.
Why do (usually) wives stay in an abusive marriage? Because they are very ill and they do not think adequately about their situation. No true agency.
When you're unarmed and surrounded by 15 men with guns who tell you that you're going to be executed you know that you're going to die. Sure you could maybe attack one of them and injure them before they shoot you, but what will that accomplish?
Some people would rather morn the fact that they'll never see their loved ones again or spend those short moments in prayer or reflection. Especially in cases where acts of horrific violence aren't in their nature.
This line was the point that invalidated the thesis for me. There are tons of things that are worse than accepting your death.
Maybe fighting back will cause harm to others. Maybe you will be tortured as punishment. Maybe you are in such pain that you want death altogether.
Death is obviously never a good option, but it doesn't take much imagination to think of far worse ones.
In Rwanda the killing apparatus was set in motion so quickly that people didn't have time to react and offer organized resistance to their neighbors. Only in Bisesero was there meaningful fighting.
In Chile enemies of the state were rounded up in the days following the coup and tortured to death.
In Argentina people were disappeared.
In Spain there were arrests, assassinations and reprisal killings.
At Katyn, how were the Poles to know they'd be shot one by one?
At Beslan, the attackers preemptively shot anyone perceived as a threat.
If you understand both the answer to that question and the fear underlying its asking, you understand a lot about how atrocity is sustained.
I can see it now even if I was disatisfied enough with the gov I don't see myself doing anything significant to fight it. Would just go with the flow. Funny I actually tried to vote for once and I couldn't because I haven't been registered recently or something... not that it mattered 20 million votes short.
Read "Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla", by Carlos Marighella, who was one.[1] And, of course, Mao.[2] Those are the two classic works. Mao is more about the politics, while Marighella is focused on guns and tactics.
[1] https://files.libcom.org/files/MarighellaManual.pdf
[2] https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/FMFRP%2012-18...
My brother has not heard of tortures without end. Compared to that, a bully to the back of your head sounds like a blessing.
datpuz•7h ago
moate•7h ago
Some people make bad, illogical choices when the stakes are extremely low, and some do the same when it's life or death. The human mind is a wonder of inefficient perfection.
datpuz•7h ago
bm3719•3h ago
The death drive is Freudian, not Jungian. However, it might be very relevant here. Freud's conception of it would include passively accepting death. As you say, by the time the prisoner is about to be executed, they're often resigned to their fate, the death drive having overcome the id long ago. Contrast with massacres where the victims weren't expecting it (the Malmedy massacre of freshly captured troops comes to mind from the same era) and you see people trying to run away once it starts.
Lacan called himself Freudian, but I think his conception links the death drive with active desire, seeking a form of self-destructive pleasure by action. I recall from Écrits that he links it to masochism, for example, calling it an expression of transgressive jouissance.