Impersonalization of death (aka egocentrism pt 2)

[afterthewar2007]

In regards to the impersonalization of the death, I've been thinking about that sort of thing a lot ever since seeing a gunplay action movie a few years ago (I believe it was A Better Tomorrow, to be specific), where the hero goes crazy and kills about fifty generic brand bad guys. I just stopped and thought about the people he killed, and how

Comments

ooh

[akuma_asian]

hmm, interesting talk, but you bring it into two directions. 1st one: The whole idea that people associate "us" and "them", and don't understand that "us" and "them" are actually very similar

Re: ooh

[afterthewar2007]

Very good illustrations of what I was trying to say. Re comment 2, I agree, with any criticism we make it should be a given that we look at ourselves to see if it's a fault of our own, as well. I also think that many people have the "You do it too, so you can't complain" philosophy. I hate that. If I'm doing something wrong too, then I need to fix it as well, it doesn't mean we cancel each other out and neither of us should complain about it or point it out. Particularly if there's already an effort to fix whatever's wrong, I think that provides more justification than the already ample "What you're doing isn't right

[xietzeming128]

Paradox: Homo sapiens are generally considered to be social creatures, yet we kill each other.

Paradox: Homo sapiens are generally considered to be social creatures, yet we have no personal sense of death when it comes to events like the tsunami.

Potential answer: If we were to gain that sense, a true stream of consciousness of every murder, rape, natural disaster, etc, etc victim, would we, generally speaking, ever sleep again? I don't think it's the media that has impersonalized death for us, I think it's a defense mechanism.