This blogpost is partly inspired by this video, featuring Taigh Hickey and Greta Thunberg:
Before this video was released, if you told me there was going to be a video with Taigh and Greta, I’d have been like, “Yes, this is the best thing that ever happened ever! Like one of those Marvel crossover events, where Dirtbike Girl and Sperm Whale Man team up to fight Doctor Nightmare!” (Yes, people who know me well will know that I DO actually know the names of the Marvel characters, but it’s just funnier if I pretend I don’t, OKAY!”)
But it’s better than a Marvel crossover event, because, instead of Disney deciding, “Yes, if we have a film with Dirtbike Girl and Sperm Whale Man, it will increase our coffers a fair amount, a fair amount I say!” it’s two of my favourite activists coming together to oppose one of the most horrific genocides of the 21st century.
But the Greta-Taigh crossover event didn’t make me happy, it just made me really, really sad. And it’s supposed to. Because what do we have now that a mass slaughter has been going on for, two years next month? Words. Words, words, words. “Good afternoon, I am Generic Celebrity Number 46351, and I whole heartedly endorse putting an end to this genocide, climate issue, or micro-aggression.”
But that’s good, right? Surely a smidge better than nothing? I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m 40 next year, when I was child, I don’t remember the exact age but we’ll say between age 6 and 10, I had these encyclopedias for children, it was called the Childcraft Series. And those encyclopedias talked about Climate Change, and Animal Extinction.
I’m just under 40, and, as a child of the nineties, I remember climate change and animal extinction, since the early 90’s! And what have we had since then? Well, mainly words!
“Good afternoon, I Am Generic Celebrity Number 58393, and I would just like to wholeheardedly oppose this, what is it this week, a sexual misconduct issue? Am I supposed to oppose some new parking ordinance? Oh yes, oh yes, climate change! With my entire heart I say, no more climate change!”
So that’s my worry, that Gaza will be talked about, and talked about, and talked about, but nothing will happen. Just like climate change, just like animal extinction.
So, while the Greta-Taigh crossover event is what’s prompting me to write this, this is actually an idea for a blogpost I’ve had in my head for a while. I’ve resisted writing it, because my fear is that the musings from some privileged guy from Irish suburbia about why this is all happening won’t help the people of Palestine one bit. But I’ve been carrying this blogpost around in my head for so long that I thought I’d just try writing it and see if anything useful comes out of it. So here it is, me, for good or bad, discussing the possible reasons for, how the world could look away for two years in the face of one of the most horrific mass slaughters of the 21st century.
Possibility 1: Humans Are Just Evil When It Comes Down To It, And The Good Stuff Is The Exception To The Rule
I’m a big science fiction fan, and there’s often a very overused trope, and it’s on TV Tropes if you want to have a look it, called “Humans Are The Real Monsters”:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HumansAreTheRealMonsters/LiveActionFilms
Basically, the humans are under attack by aliens, or zombies, or vampires, or robots, and at some point during the film or tv show, one of the characters muses, “Perhaps humans are the real monsters!” This could be because of a plotline where, the zombies, or aliens, aren’t deliberately malicious, they’re just doing what their instincts are telling them to do, but the human characters may deliberately act in a selfish and cruel way.
I remember thinking for a long time that this was just a tired, misanthropic trope. It seemed like the writers of such things were just trying to be “edgy” by saying humans are terrible. But, after two years of “We can’t complicatedly there’s wrong on both sides be getting involved in politics.” This is a possibility that I must consider. Perhaps humans are just, shit?
Humans are capable of absolutely amazingly kind, selfless and beautiful acts. Whether it’s the Global Somud Flotilla, sailing to Gaza to help the people there in any way they can, in defiance of an absolutely psychotic and terrifying regime, whether it’s the mass boycott of South Africa that led to apartheid’s fall, or the many, many people who risked their lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust.
So on one side you can say, humans are helping the people of Gaza, humans helped the people of South Africa, and humans helped the victims of the Holocaust, but on the other, humans committed genocide against Gaza, humans committed apartheid in South Africa, and humans were the ones that caused the Holocaust. Is the wonderful stuff that humans do, notable, because it’s so rare?
And (don’t worry, I’m getting the most depressing possibility out of the way first!) there’s something I think about a lot while I’m out photographing or recording wildlife. Certain animals have behaviours that would absolutely shock you, that can’t be explained as needing to do it because of mere survival. Male mallards rape female mallards. I’ve witnessed it, and it’s absolutely horrifying. The only way this behaviour will ever cease, is if the mallard duck species evolves into a different type of species over the next few millennia. There will never be any kind of social justice revolution where this horrific act of violence is brought to an end.
But humans aren’t like animals, humans are the only species on Earth to travel to the moon! No, we’re different from a lot of animals on Earth by many metrics, but we ARE animals. If no animal on Earth is capable of social justice movements to bring about more compassionate behaviour, if mallards are incapable of becoming less violent, if coots are incapable of sharing food with their young equally, instead of choosing which ones live and which ones die, and if otters, to be perfectly honest I’ll spare you the details of what otters do, then, isn’t it possible that the human animal is only capable of only very minute changes in its behaviour, and much like all of the other animals on Earth, our behaviour is a lot more fixed than we would like to believe?
Possibility 2: Humanity Is Capable Of Improvement, We Just Have a LONG Way To Go.
Sometimes I speculate on why, on the one hand, we had the U.S Civil Rights movement, over sixty years ago, and on the other hand, we have a horrific mass slaughter in Gaza. Of course, the obvious thing that needs to be pointed out is that, racism isn’t even anywhere close to being defeated in America. But at the same time, the same society, the United States, that decided segregation was evil and had to be ended, has been completely useless when it comes to Gaza? This isn’t to say all Americans are like that, but many of them are, and the United States government is actively complicit in the mass slaughter.
Now, there could be many reasons for this. Maybe in the United States the U.S Civil Rights Movement was just better at achieving its goals than pro-Palestine groups are. Maybe the U.S government was afraid of the Soviet Union winning the moral argument in the public consciousness because of the U.S’s horrific treatment of black people. These might be true, but there is another possibility I’d like to speculate on.
That white America eventually decided, “Hang on a second, it’s not right to treat our fellow Americans this way!” So, perhaps, the circle of empathy expanded, and it was recognized that all people of colour living in America deserved full civil liberties. So there was still a primitive tribalism at play, it was just realized that Black Americans were party of the tribe.
So, perhaps, and sadly I can see it taking decades, centuries or longer, we still need to get to the point where we realize that ALL of humanity is our tribe.
Possibility 3: The good that humanity does is for reasons that aren’t that moral.
This relates back to possibility 2. Maybe America gave in on segregation so as not to be outdone by the Soviet Union. They put a man on the moon to beat the Ruskies. Perhaps they were willing to give black people basic civil liberties for the same reason?
What about when the United Kingdom, and the United States fought against Hitler? That was to prevent the extermination of the Jewish people, right? With regard to the United States, Germany declared war on them.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_Declaration_of_War_against_the_United_States
And the United Kingdom? The U.K and Poland had signed an agreement that if one was attacked, the other would come to their aid.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Anglo-Polish_alliance
It does look like the Allies fought WWII for completely self interested reasons, and the ending of the horrific slaughter of the Jewish people was a good thing that happened to come out of that.
And, sadly, it does look like the Western powers don’t have a self interested reason for ending the genocide in Gaza.
Possibility 4: There is no “getting better” or “getting worse”, humanity just has good eras and bad eras.
Less depressing then possibility 1, but still depressing. The overall behaviour of humanity goes through good times, and bad times. Now we are during a really bad, incredibly dark time. Perhaps 100 years from now things will be so good as to be practically utopian. But then we’ll enter a horrifying dystopia again, then there’ll be good times again. And so on and so forth. Swinging from good to bad, and back again, for however long humanity occupies this rock.
I certainly hope this one isn’t true, but it does explain a few things. It would explain how humanity is capable of such self sacrifice when it comes to helping their fellow humans, but also, equally, capable of sacrificing their fellow human beings for a worthless cause. Perhaps the magnificent, wonderful things that humanity is capable of, will never stop happening, when the time is right. But perhaps this is equally true of the horrific things that humanity is capable of.
Possibility 5: Because of the human brain’s difficulty with processing large numbers of people, there will always be a lot of difficulty with emphasizing with people who live very far away or are outside of our own community.
I’ve talked before about Dunbar’s Number.
Robin Dunbar theorized that human beings have a lot of difficulty with processing large numbers of people. To give a simple example to illustrate this, do you think you could learn 4000 people’s names? Not get to know them, in any particularly real sense, just learn their names? Neither could I, and I’d guess neither could anyone. And there’s 8.5 billion people on Earth. So, by the time the amount of people, about two years ago, killed in Gaza, exceeded 150, it was already a greater amount of people than your brain can process. And you couldn’t even process THEIR deaths, because you already know at least 150 people in your own community. And of course, that’s not counting the vast number of people that Israel killed before October 2023.
So, that’s a very, very dark possibility. That the numbers simply do not matter. Conservative estimates of how many were killed in Gaza are now at 60,000, but it was already too much for the human brain to process when it was far, far lower than that. And, if this possibility is correct, it doesn’t matter how high the numbers go, at all. Anyone who didn’t care when the number of deaths were relatively low, won’t care any more as the body count keeps rising.
Possibility 6: Humanity as a whole is good, or at least sufficiently good to not commit a horrifying genocide, it’s the people in power who are the problem.
This is the one I really want to be true. I’m going to quote the really famous quote. Are you ready!
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”
And I did you one better and included the other parts of the quote and not just the short bit that everyone remembers!
That quote is from John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, who famously talked about how corrupting power was to the human mind. With a name like that, I have to believe he was talking from personal experience.
What DOES power do to the human mind? Does it invariably make you see other humans beings as mere objects that you are free to manipulate, or does it cause you to see yourself as the stern but fair parent, and you must get the “children” that you are in charge of to do what they are told for their own good?
I’ve talked a lot about how a lot of “ordinary” people, I’ve encountered have absolutely callous and vile attitudes towards the people of Gaza. Does this prove it’s not just those in power, but a problem of humanity itself? Not necessarily. The media in Ireland and abroad has made excuse, after excuse, after excuse for this horrific genocide. Perhaps those in power are to blame when the powerless are in different to, or worse, in favour of the mass slaughter of the people in Gaza. So, if we could just make those in power go away, maybe things would be alright? However, that leads to possibility 7.
Possibility 7: While it is those in power, as opposed to humanity, who are the problem, those in power will never be gotten rid of.
I live in a country where there have been two parties in power, for longer than my entire life, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. While normally in the word Fianna Fail there is what’s called a “fada”, over the letter a, I have declined to include that for reasons I hope are obvious.
So, every election, there is a lot of talk about how we need to get them out, and then they get in, again. Same with the next election. And the election after that. And the election after that.
Same in the United States. it’s the Republicans and the Democrats, over and over again.
The United Kingdom? Tories or Labour, over and over again. Though Nigel Farage has been gaining a lot of popularity lately, and to say that that creates its own set of problems is an understatement.
So, that’s definitely an unfortunate possibility we have to consider. It’s not humanity as a whole, it’s those who keep getting into power, but keep getting into power they always will. Perhaps if a new party finally gets in in Ireland, they will become corrupt and within a short time be indistinguishable from FF and FG. Perhaps if a revolution brings in an entirely new political system it won’t be long before that political system becomes corrupt. Will humanity ever escape from the cycle of one corrupt president, prime minister, or outright dictator being replaced with another?
In all of this madness, there is only one certainty we have.
These are just seven possibilities I can think of for why things are the way they are, how it is possible to turn away from the two year screams of pain and torment that are coming out of Gaza. I would give anything to turn one or more of these possibilities into a certainty, to answer, once and for all the, question. How could this happen? How did this absolute evil manage to take place in a world we hoped, and of course it was always just a hope, in a world that had some level of basic decency?
Will I get the answer to this, ever? I have no idea. But we have just one certainty, just one certainty in all of this.
If we do nothing, the horrific slaughter, the absolutely destruction of Gaza, will definitely happen. If we do something, if we try to oppose this insanity, will we be successful? I don’t know, the answer is, I simply do not know. But I’d rather try my best to oppose this horror, knowing that we have no way of knowing if we can succeed, than to do nothing, and know the genocide will most certainly continue.
People have said to me, about the genocide in Gaza, and about other horrific injustices, that there’s definitely no point in trying. They say there isn’t a shadow of doubt in their minds that it’s most certainly pointless. I’d like whatever crystal ball they have access to if they think they can be so sure. But which is more likely, that they have access to amazingly accurate information on what the future holds, or that believing that there is no point, means that they don’t have to do anything, and that suits them fine?
I either don’t know, or don’t want to know, why the absolute evil that is happening in Gaza for two years, has gone on that long, and at the end of it, all we have is Generic Celebrity Number 4820485 stating that they are against it, but without anything actually happening. And when I say, “I don’t want to know”, I worry that there’s a truth that I don’t want to face. That the evil my species does, far, far outweighs the good.
But in a sense, does it matter? Whether we want to make the philosophical argument that humanity is a good species or a bad species, the situation in Gaza is the same. The people there need our help. So, let the rich and powerful make their empty speeches two years far too late, and resolve to do whatever you can to help.
Join the Palestine protests if it’s safe to you to do so in your country. Boycott Israeli products. And talk to people. This will often feel like banging your head against a wall, which is why I’ll admit I don’t talk to people about it as much as I should, but getting through to one person is worth it, even if you have to go through the pain of hearing one hundred people saying, “I stay out of complicated on both sides.”
Do we really want to witness the complete destruction of Palestine, and wonder was the reason for that that we gave into hopelessness to such a degree that it created a self fulfilling prophecy? I know I don’t.
Saoirse Don Phalaistín!
Ponderings Of An Autist 
One thought on “Trying To Make Sense Of Absolute Insanity”