On becoming comfortably numb

We turn the page and move on now, from wars, brutality, rapes, genocides, lies. How can we bring outrage back into our lives?

Something is happening to us. We don’t feel outrage any more.

We feel other things, certainly. Such as, offended—especially when so-called “religious sensitivities” are involved. The offence can escalate to fury of the how-dare-they kind, as it did in September 2016 when a rumour got around Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, that a certain man with a certain kind of beard was at that very moment eating beef in his house with his family.

You may recall that a crowd surged to Muhammad Akhlaq’s house and butchered him in front of his family. Although 18 people from the mob were arrested, their lawyers pleaded that they had “been provoked” and should be released, as though a crime of passion is somehow heroic rather than savage. [To set the record straight, no beef was found at Akhlaq’s house, and no law in the country makes beef consumption punishable by death or even punishable at all.]

So we no longer feel outrage, but we do feel fury, as when someone contradicts us on a WhatsApp chat. We feel road rage, whether we’re on the road or not, if someone gets between us and where we’re going. Anything can follow, from foul curses that vilify mothers and sisters to assault and manslaughter.

How is outrage different? In my layman’s world, outrage is powered by an overwhelming sense that something unjust and unjustifiable is happening and needs to be stopped. Unlike hypersensitivity, fury, anger, indignation and road rage, outrage is ego-free. India became independent because of Gandhi’s calm outrage, not anybody’s flash of anger. Outrage is your higher self recognising an inequity, whether minor or world-changing, local or global. Your outrage at a man feeling up a woman in a crowded bus can be just as in-tense as at hospital workers withholding the release of a dead child’s body to its parents until they pay a tip—or at the rape and butchery of Rohingya mothers and children by Burma’s military. Unlike anger, which eats up your soul, outrage empowers it, making it incandescent. It makes you want to act.

I believe we’re losing that wonderful weapon.

On October 7, 2016, a month before the US election, Donald Trump claimed he could touch women wherever he wanted because he was rich and famous—“You can do anything... grab ‘em by the p***y”. There was instant worldwide outrage. Trump was widely condemned; prominent members of his own party withdrew their support.

This year, the same Trump lewdly mimicked oral sex with a microphone five days before the election—and went on to a resounding, historic victory. There was thunderous applause—for a convicted felon, an inveterate lifelong liar with neither morality nor civility, known for feeling up women and enriching himself by exploiting his presidency.

There was no outrage.

Moving on. The UN Human Rights Office has verified the deaths of 8,119 Gazans since the war started. (The Gaza Health Ministry says the correct number is 43,300.) Close to half of the victims (according to the UN) were children, mostly between five and nine, and a quarter were women.

No outrage, though there were  raised voices at coffee bars. How dare the Israelis! in the same useless shrill voice as How dare the Pakistanis! and How dare the Maoists!

Moving on. On Sunday, many tenants were evicted from their homes in the Santacruz Air India Colony, recently acquired for redevelopment by a certain Mr. Adani. Ailing, elderly people in wheelchairs were forced out of their homes, one old woman still clutching her oxygen cylinder. In the hurry to eject tenants, one house was sealed with two sisters still inside. Litigation is going on.

You will be forgiven for not even knowing about it. If you do know but don’t feel anything in particular, we will not punish your lack of outrage. We will say that you, like me and everyone else, have become comfortably numb.

Psychologists call it psychic numbing, referring to the notion that the more people are brutalised or die, the less we care.

“One life is tremendously important and valuable and we’ll do anything to protect that life, save that life, rescue that person,” says Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon professor who has studied psychic numbing for decades. “But as the numbers increase, our feelings don’t commensurately increase as well.”

Becoming desensitised by relentless statistical shocks makes you less likely to do anything to stop genocides, react to natural calamities or feel any alarm that our planet is on fire already through climate change.

A desensitised person no longer sees something that’s odd as odd, accepting it as banal and mundane, says Gracie Eppler in  The Observer.

There may be a way out. These days, when I see a statistic, I dig deeper for a single story that illustrates it, because it will touch me somewhere that numbers don’t reach. Once I find a moving story, I share it in the same news and social media. Just to stir the pot.

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will,” said a remarkable woman in Kolkata. 

Her name was Mother Teresa.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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