6/22/25 Collective Numbness

I sit here in a coffee shop, living my mundane life, working on some projects that are due in a few days. I try to distract myself, but I fail. I am surrounded by faces that are living and smiling as if the world isn’t in flames right now. It makes me wonder if they are clueless or careless. How can their government be complicit in waging another never-ending war in my region while they act as if the lives of millions of people are not going to be affected by this?

Where is the empathy? I heard someone say that a few lives lost is a tragedy, while millions is a statistic. Is it a defense mechanism, perhaps? That the horrors of reality are so overwhelming that the mind starts triggering a self-defense mechanism of denial to protect itself from any truth that puts too much pressure on it to bear.

Is this the human psychology that all these psychopathic leaders take advantage of? Knowing that the conscience of people, when subjected to overwhelming horrors, numbs itself. Like that pigeon that closes its eyes in front of a cat, thinking that that’ll make the cat disappear. But does that cat actually disappear? Do the people subjected to these horrors forget the horrors? What other motivation do they need for their generational hatred now? How long can two oceans absorb the reverberations of this hatred?

But conscience is a funny thing. It can be momentarily muzzled. It cannot be killed. Sooner or later, it takes over. It starts slowly. Sometimes in the later hours of sleepless nights or triggered by a familiar event. At first, it seems innocuous. A transient jolt of a passing earthquake. It starts gnawing at the brain. The horrors start consuming one from the inside. People go insane. Societies implode.

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” — Dostoyevsky