Item — HN Reader

> Once you see a person executed you're no longer the same person.

If witnessing what your society does in your name causes you distress, it's worth some contemplation, don't you think?

For example, if society is doing things "for me" behind closed doors and all I see are sanitized benefits (e.g. cheap gasoline, less stinky sewage, garbage that just vanishes, easy pieces of meat, etc.) then I'm at risk of asking for more things with nasty side-effects and I'll never really be in touch with what I'm doing to other people or the planet.

IMO, violence (against people or animals or the environment) should always be witnessed and if it's done "for us", we should have to see and do our best to understand it.

2 comments

The implication that distress from public executions will engender the better angels of our nature is not well-founded.

Audiences at public executions, past and present, cheer. Photos of public lynchings from the Jim Crow South show throngs of smiling faces. Thousands of people traveled across state lines to witness the spectacle of the last legal public hanging in Kentucky. The crowd at the last public beheading in France (in 1939) exhibited such "hysterical behavior" that public executions were immediately banned.

Regular public violence is not rejected by human nature, it is normalized.

At first I was against the idea of public executions, but you made a strong argument. >>I'll never really be in touch with what I'm doing to other people or the planet

that right there changed my mind.

The coliseum didn't reduce people's tolerance for violence, it normalized it.