Our Brains Are Normalizing Atrocity. What the Hell is Happening to Us?

There was a time when a single report of a prisoner being raped produced a physical revolt in one's body. The reports come daily now. We feel the shiver less. That is what is happening to us.

When Atrocities Stop Being Crises and Become Condition

Today I read something on someone's wallpost about how atrocity, sustained long enough, stops being a crisis and becomes a condition. It becomes weather. It becomes the ambient noise of the century. It becomes the thing we scroll past on our way to whatever else the algorithm has decided we should feel today. The shift from crisis to condition is not the failure of attention; it is the achievement of a specific kind of political work, which is the gradual evacuation of moral content from a phenomenon by sheer endurance. The atrocity outlasts our capacity to be horrified. That is the strategy. It has always been the strategy. The Armenians knew this. The Rwandans knew this. The Bosnians knew this, the Native Americans knew this. The dead know it best of all, because the dead are the ones who watch from beneath the rubble as the world decides, day by day, that what is happening to them is no longer interesting.

I think this diagnosis …