Weblog
There is one thing I dislike the most about being human, and I think it is that we are so easily swayed by apathy. Psychologically, it is all too easy for us to withdraw our emotional investments, shrug once, and forsake our ability to observe guilt. All committed crimes seem to be the result of some measure of ignorance and apathy, which are nearly synonymous in the context of deliberate injustice, and I engender a lot of angst having to live with the fact that the offenders of said crimes simply don’t care.
Admittedly, this travesty cannot be helped; we all have too many commitments in our lives to concern ourselves with everything about everything, and so with varying degrees of severity, we are all guilty of apathy. Clearly though, some are afflicted in unconventionally extreme ways. You and I both know at least one or two people who have fallen from grace even when we considered it an impossibility. The reason for such episodes of uncharacteristically malign behavior, as I will guess without having read any documented studies on the subject, is that there are circumstances — unique to the individual — in which the region of the human brain responsible for initiating willful behavior seems to distance itself from the region that encodes morality.
This phenomenon is apparent in people who might shoplift despite having an otherwise honest and well-regulated life — that is, a life full of meaningful relationships and devoid of injurious habits. (Note that this instance excludes kleptomaniacs.) Additionally, similar cases exist among people who play on-line games. Their behavior is especially surprising, because although the hostility they project to other players in-game can’t really compare to any real-life crime in execution, their intent and motivation almost always exceeds in malice anything they would ever consider committing in real life. As a gamer myself, I have witnessed players making surprisingly vulgar remarks in in-game chat that completely contradict their own normal codes of conduct. The reason for this trend is clear: proximity. The farther from face-to-face communication the abstraction is, the easier it is to just not care about the person on the other side of the screen.
I have friends who steal. Not just music; everyone steals music. Usually, they steal from stores. They steal drinks and donuts and bagels and muffins. They break open vending machines and steal bags of chips in large quantities. A few of them will occasionally undertake more risky endeavors and will try to steal furniture for their own use. They steal homework so they don’t have to do it themselves. I’m sure they’ve stolen a lot more than I can list here, but it is sufficient for me merely to know that they steal. They have other fixations, like smoking and other forms of substance abuse, to which I have a natural aversion, but if there’s one thing I wish they didn’t do, it is stealing.
I am hard pressed to forgive the act of stealing in the form it takes in the aforementioned crimes. It is far too premeditated and resolute to be excusable. To physically walk into an establishment and take hold of some tangible item that by right is not your own, and then to leave with it presumably under a guise of secrecy and anonymity without permission, explicit or implicit, indicates a volatile mental capacity that, by the mandate of every prevailing human institution, should either be lawfully restrained or just not exist at all.
It indicates an apathy I simply cannot tolerate.