Postmodern Empathy Circus
Congratulations to all of us. We've finally achieved the pinnacle of postmodern human evolution, the ability to scroll past a high-definition livestream of a literal genocide, pause for three seconds to feel a completely useless ping of intellectual gloom, and then immediately swipe down to watch a corporate sponsored cat video without missing a single beat. It’s called "disaffected empathy," but let's call it what it really is, a psychological survival condom for the digital age, protecting our last remaining brain cells from the radioactive sludge of daily reality. We see the horror, we log the data points of human cruelty, and we feel absolutely nothing. But this structural paralysis isn’t some accidental glitch in the human software. We didn't just wake up one day and decide to become emotionally hollow ghosts. We were engineered this way. Back in 1961, old Ike Eisenhower gave us that famous, grandfatherly warning about the "Military/Industrial Complex...