Psychic numbing and genocide (2007)
<i>Power notes that in every instance America and the rest of the world looked away.</i><p>&quot;Damned if you do, damned if you don&#x27;t.&quot;<p>When America does go in, the world accuses it of <i>interfering</i> and makes ugly jokes about &quot;Be nice to America or they will bring democracy to you too&quot; (or similar).<p><i>But the repetitiveness of such atrocities, ignored by powerful people and nations, and by the general public, calls for explanations that may reflect some fundamental deficiency in our humanity-a deficiency that, once identified, might possibly be overcome.</i><p>Wow. Way to go to alienate anyone and everyone on the planet.<p>It&#x27;s a complex situation. The way you solve complex situations is by doing your best to find non-blamey framings that focus on answers, not on finger pointing.<p><i>The numbers fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action.</i><p>Riiiight. Feeeelings. This is the be all and end all of why people do things. (In case it needs to be said: This bit is sarcasm.)<p>I can&#x27;t tell you how often I was screwed over and pissed off about it while homeless because someone had <i>feelings</i> and wanted to pretend to be a <i>good person</i> and had no idea how to effectively help me but they were dedicated to screwing blindly with my life anyway.<p><i>Perhaps the most basic form of feeling is affect, the sense (not necessarily conscious) that something is good or bad.</i><p>Affect is a quick-and-dirty decision-making metric that is ill-suited to use in large, complex and nuanced situations that will take years to resolve, at best. You know, like genocides.<p><i>One last important psychological element in this story is attention. Just as feelings are necessary for motivating helping, attention is necessary for feelings.</i><p>More nonsense.<p>Here is reality:<p>I know nothing about Darfur. This is possibly the first I have heard of ongoing genocide there. There are plenty of big problems on my very doorstep that require attention without me looking to screw with the lives of strangers on the other side of the planet whose culture, history, etc etc I know nothing about and am, thus, not qualified to do much to meaningfully help.<p>I spent years homeless. I have had a college class on homelessness. I have spent decades trying to figure out how America, where I live, can do something meaningful about widespread homelessness.<p>Homeless people tend to die on average about two decades earlier than housed people. Lack of housing kills people. It is a form of polite genocide happening on my very doorstep.<p>There is also a long history of race-based genocide in the US. Blacks are descended from slaves and Native Americans had their land mostly stolen from them and I don&#x27;t know how to find some way to provide justice on those issues in my very country.<p>We Americans don&#x27;t have it all solved right here at home. Acting like it is somehow our fault that other people are screwing up their own country even more blatantly is all kinds of weird and crazy nonsense.<p>You know what really drives a lot of people, American or otherwise, to &quot;help&quot; people who are poorer than them etc? The idea that those folks have problems that are <i>easy</i> to solve, unlike <i>ours.</i> Our problems are hard to solve. There are no easy answers, so I&#x27;m going to pretend I&#x27;m a good person and go randomly fuck with the lives of people who are &quot;less fortunate&quot; and don&#x27;t confuse me with the facts.<p><i>Diet for a Small Planet</i> documents the fact that most countries can feed their own. If they aren&#x27;t, it&#x27;s because of things like civil war, political BS <i>and outside interference</i>.<p>When America goes and tries to feed starving people in foreign countries, we commonly export our own lousy beef-and-wheat based diet and get people hooked on foods they cannot afford to buy that actively cause health issues.<p>Fordlandia is just one of many experiments where some American thought they could go in and provide some top down superior solution, ignored local wisdom and knowledge entirely and it failed horrifically. There have been many other examples like that.