Fog of War
Thinking about the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, it occurred to me that there's something about current Western society (at least in the U.S.) that can kind of inoculate you to the realities of the world.
I see this difference whenever I visit a 3rd world country and come back to the U.S.. Everything will feel less real for a month or so and then settle back on their old patterns.
This pattern came up again yesterday, when a lot of people in general seem to take Ukraine with less gravity than the situation really calls for. There's a part of me that feels the same way – it's fun to meme something as serious as war. On the other hand, the part of me that has read so many books and seen so many realistic portrayals of war is yelling at me for how serious this actually is.
I sometimes perform thought experiments on this kind of thing – suppose that a foreign country invades the U.S. and hostile troops are literally in my city, would I be able to quickly take reality into account and act quickly? Odds are it would probably take me a while. The length of time it would take me to adjust to that reality is, in a way, how much fog I am in when it comes to thinking about war (and certain realities of the world).
Catch-22, one of those anti-war novels, is pretty much precisely about that realization when the book's protagonist actually come into contact with the realities of war. This quote at the climax of the book feels relevant here:
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.
— Categorized under: #psychology