Philosophy Hour: Should You Expend Personal Emotional Energy on Every Bad Thing That Happens on Earth?

I recently wrote about a little girl who was killed by a stray bullet in Chicago.

I made the following comment:

This whole thing about caring about people I’ve never even met dying is really just faggoty and retarded. I mean, it’s sad, okay, whatever – but honestly, I couldn’t really care any less. I definitely care more about these blacks in these shows based on novels from my childhood, and I really think that people who pretend to care that people they never met are dead are faking it for social credit scores.

Unlike this 8-year-old bitch getting killed by niggers, the casting of Foundation actually affects my life directly.

Sorry. Not sorry. I’m not sorry at all, and I really think you’re a faggot.

This was obviously meant to be provocative. I have always considered that the primary point of the website. I get into various complicated commentary, because no one else seems to be doing it, but my instincts are toward provocation of the readership for the purpose of triggering reflection in the reader.

Maybe it’s all a jerk-off. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just an asshole who likes saying offensive things, and saying I don’t care about a dead girl is probably going to offend a fair number of people.

One reader informed me that I lacked empathy and am unintelligent in comparison to many other people on the internet.

I responded, I believe, intelligently. Perhaps over provocatively. It’s also possible I just use “provocative” as a euphemism for vulgar and rude.

I wrote: 

Well, good luck expending emotional energy on every single news story about yet another corpse, I guess.

I’m not going to do it, and I’m not going to tell other people to do it, and I think it is actually insane to try to care about every single person on earth who dies.

I once was in [x third world shithole] after a flood, and saw people lining up bodies by the dozens on a dry part of a road. Most of them were children. I didn’t know any of them, but I certainly felt sad. I made a point not to think about it anymore.

But hey – go read every news story about every murder that happens on earth and expend emotional energy on it.

Only 1% of deaths are from murder. So I guess you should go read news stories about the other 99% of deaths and feel bad about that too.

You should devote your entire existence to feeling bad about people you don’t know dying.

Those are your values. You should practice them, instead of trying to shame me. As you say, there are many websites that will tell you about how sad it is that people you don’t know died.

Personally, I’m well aware of the fact that human beings are not biologically capable of expending emotional energy on every single bad thing that happens on the earth. We used to live in tribes, and know no more than a few dozen people, and we were therefore easily able to expend the emotional energy to care when someone died. Mass media has changed the wiring of our brains and created mass insanity, where you are socially obligated to care about things that have nothing to do with you.

But no, yeah – you do you. Go devote your life to reading news stories about people you’ve never met, in places you’ve never been, who died, and then feeling really bad about it. Make a vlog about how your life turns out.

If you only care about some kid that got shot in Chicago because you happened across the news story, while condemning others for not caring, then you’re just a hypocrite. You need to hunt down every news story of every random person on earth who dies and feel bad about it.

Go do it.

Furthermore

It was rude, what I said. It was disrespectful to a dead girl, and to her family. But hey – she’s not going to be reading it. I doubt her family is either.

The point was not to disrespect the dead girl, however. The point was to draw attention to the fact that every time you turn on the media, they are asking you to expend emotional energy on things that don’t have anything to do with your life, and this is not healthy. It doesn’t serve any purpose, other than as emotional stimulation.

It makes no difference to my life that this girl is dead. If I didn’t know she was dead, I wouldn’t know she was dead. If I find out she is dead, and feel really bad about it, she remains dead. Her parents will not know I feel bad she’s dead. This is effectively pouring my limited emotional energy into a black hole.

I am not God. I cannot take the entire weight of the world, of every tragedy that happens, on my shoulders.

I do not want a Christian society where Christian people sit around reading about every bad thing that happens in the world to people they don’t even know and then feel bad about it. That is the fundamental value of the system we have right now – the concept that you have an obligation to care about people that have nothing to do with you.

For example, I’ve never met a tranny. I’ve known very few black people. I’m never been to Afghanistan, or met an Afghan refugee. I’ve never met a Syrian refugee. I’ve never been to a Libyan slave market. I did not witness the Jewish Holocaust. I am not a Ukrainian Jew. I am not a Taiwanese homosexual, or a Hong Kong Antifa, or a Wigger Moslem, and I don’t know any of these people. Yet every single day of my life, I’m told I need to care about all of these things, to worry about them, to pour out my limited human emotions on them.

There you have the provocation of saying “I don’t care about this little dead girl.” It’s an extreme example, as everyone feels sad when they hear about a little girl getting shot. But the principle is the same. This has nothing to do with my life, there is nothing I can do about it. If I had been there when the colored gentleman was firing his gun off randomly in a parking lot, I might have pulled out my CCW and shot him, thereby saving the girl’s life. But I wasn’t there. This has nothing to do with me, my life, or my problems.

I have my own family and friends. I have my own personal and professional struggles. I have my own dead people to mourn.

I’m not going to be emotionally bullied by the media into pouring out emotions on things that have nothing to do with me, and I would very strongly advise others to take the same stance.

If you choose to pour emotional energy into all of these things, you could go insane. You would eventually, if, as I advised the offended reader, you went and read every story of every tragedy on earth and felt really bad about it. But you’re not going to do that. No one is going to do that. Instead, they are going to be constantly poked with this emotional blackmail by the media, and they will be drained of their vital essence, which will lead to a weakened psyche.

We are not designed for this. 

Electronic media is affecting us in all kinds of ways that we do not understand, and which we do not even consider.

I realize that my site is electronic media. But therefore, I put forward provocation. I also put forward the idea that the only thing you need to focus on is your own life, your own family, your own friends and community.

Including all of this other stuff in your personal universe will eventually destroy you.

So why did I post the story of the girl getting shot? Well, other than the opportunity of a provocation – a girl so cute killed for no reason at all, and telling you I care more that Salvor Hardin was turned into a black female than I do about the girl’s death. You might not have understood that when you read it, you might have just thought I was being an asshole, but it is intended to stimulate an emotional response which triggers a series of psychological developments.

Maybe, this followup was necessary, in which case I thank the person who called me unintelligent and without empathy for spurring me to clear it up.

The other reason I wrote about it is just the obvious one – black people are extremely, outrageously violent, and they are turning cities into killing fields, and you – you personally, as an individual person – need to know this as a matter of your own survival.

You need to get out of these cities, you need to protect yourself and your family.

Maybe I’m an unintelligent asshole with no empathy. I don’t know. I consider myself self-reflective, but that sort of observation would be beyond self-reflection.

What I will say is that I think about what I do when I write. I have goals, I have an agenda, and I do my very best to fulfill that agenda.