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If a monk lights himself on fire and nobody watches, has he made a protest?
by minimum_wage

    Aristotle once observed that the plot of a tragedy should be so framed that, even without witnessing the events, simply hearing of them should fill one with “horror and pity”—even lead to insight and action. But the amphitheater of the 21st century has fallen into decay, scattered and fragmented into a multitude of media platforms. There are too many actors in too many theaters and their tragedies—overwhelming, lacking in context, incoherent, truncated or badly reported—have lost their grip on the human psyche.

    Studies about desensitization of the modern mind are aplenty, but the general consensus is that over-saturation of images and narratives of violence have resulted in a collective numbness. A profound act of public death cannot hope to sway a world in which horror itself has lost its power.