1/ I don't see terrorism anymore. I see the violence, blood and bodies, but I don't perceive the tragedy or horror.
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2/ I don't mean this in a nihilistic way. It makes me feel like something is broken in me. Like, I'll have an emotional response to some DoDo videos, but incidents of terrorism barely move my affective needle.
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3/ Because of decades of exposure to endless and breathless punditry and their feverish attempts to score ideologically supporting evidence weighted by body counts and viscera, my brain just sees it as background noise now.
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4/ Cognitively, it feels closer to watching a "bull" and a "bear" debate the Dow levels on some finance show than lives literally torn to shreds. That's absolutely awful.
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5/ I'm purposely not tagging this with today's incident because I don't want anyone to think I'm saying it "who cares?" or doesn't matter. But, every time, I feel like group offense and defense obscures this corrosive psychological effect and I want to talk about it more.
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@NGrossman81 is there something I can read about this process. Or even a name for it so I can follow some ideas?4 replies 0 retweets 2 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @generativist
It sounds like you're talking about desensitization--the process by which something that was shocking becomes less so, or even feels normal, as one is exposed to it more. Lot of thinking about desensitization in terrorism studies, but I don't have a go-to article to recommend.
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Replying to @NGrossman81 @generativist
I can tell you this much--your reaction is pretty common. There's nothing wrong with it (seriously, nothing wrong at all). It's a normal part of human psychology to, in essence, learn to live with something that's out of your control.
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Yea. Like, from the stuff I study, there are lots of obvious cognitive processes easily implicated. But, even knowing those, it's always a bit jarring to suddenly recognize your induced blindspots.
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