Trying to Matter

matt.is

59 points·h34t··4 comments

"and no matter how much you learn, much of the world is inherently unpredictable."

I think that's the core lesson. In the West and the rest of the developed world we've created stable societies that we tend to take for granted. It's really just a layer of order superimposed on inherent chaos, that can break down if we're not careful about maintaining and cultivating it (financial crisis I'm looking at you).

What is terrifying is that the ones committing these atrocities are people just like us, they share the same genetic makeup, part of the same human race. Somehow their actions makes me think that we are not that far away from acting like them, we have our stable society but how much does it take for us to start committing those atrocities? Of course we think we would never ever do those things, but there are instances of soldiers who come from "stable" societies who end up acting no better than these people ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre )

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

I think it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that because this happened in a primitive village in a part of Africa with a history of conflict, "it's always been that way."

What made news of this attack so jolting was that our family had experienced Nyankunde in peaceful years. It was a beautiful place with wonderful people. I had always wanted to go back.

amazing job identifying something that is really hard to express and describe, especially in words. +1

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