I often question why people have such a high threshold for an outrage? There is a certain numbness; it seems people couldn’t be swayed by any injustice or imperfections around them. They say “this is how it is in the world, life is not fair, sad reality, same everywhere”, etc. I don’t think indifference or even cynicism is an explanation. Just try this as an experiment, go to your best friend and say “John killed Bob”. There would be a surprise, even shock but normally no visceral reaction. Perhaps one can interpreter it as indifference. Now take some ideological marker dear to your friend, even a sport’s team and challenge one of the assumptions. You will be greeted by an immediate and emotionally forceful pushback. What’s going on here? Why such a common and odd asymmetry?
I think I know the answer. People never live in the present. People construct some ideological framework that they always project onto the past. They motion through the familiar recital: “human beings used to matter, they cared back then”, etc. We have been parachuted into the present, we are really ambassadors of a different reality from the utopian country called “the past”. Each of us is a foreign diplomat who looks at a far away county from the window of a bus that drives us from the airport to the walled embassy. We are resigned to the fact that things are not healthy or normal now. Therefore nothing you can possibly observe about the present can sway us, as the present is long gone (so to speak) and condemned. Contemporary can’t evoke an emotional reaction, not even a murder or your vanilla variety gross injustice. But the past is where the real emotional life and struggle is invested. A person who is numb to pain around him suddenly becomes sensitive and alert. In fact there is an inverse proportion; more a person is invested in the past less this person is responsive to the present. An art is an act of questioning the past utopia and drawing attention to the sensory now, nothing could be more culturally annoying, disruptive or insulting.
Further reading: