When violence and disaster become daily headlines, do they lose some of their emotional weight? If so, is that a sign of emotional numbing, adaptation, or a necessary form of psychological self-preservation? And if our responses do dull over time, should that concern us, or is it simply how humans adapt?
When American Leftists murdered Charlie Kirk, and cheered about it, that was my Reality-Check. These people want True Americans dead. They are possessed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. They believe they’re fighting “muh evil fascist nazis” because they’re obedient sheeple doing whatever CNN and MSDNC instruct them to.
America is already in a war. It’s just not hot yet. Why should True Americans have any sympathy for them/you?
They call you “Nazi” because they want you dead.
My question wasn’t about political sides or justification of violence. It was about how constant exposure to tragedy affects our emotional responses as humans, not framing it as a war between groups.
To answer your question more directly and simply then,
No, when I watched the public sniper murder of Charlie Kirk, I was not “desensitized” by it. I was very angry, that Americans would stoop to the low level of murdering innocent men or women, for whatever reason. It’s similar to school spree-shooters, targeting the most vulnerable targets of society.
It does not “Desensitize” me. It does the opposite. I was motivated to Vote for the first time in decades in the recent election AGAINST VIOLENCE, AGAINST AMERICAN LEFTISTS. I’m tired of American Leftists using violence and murder, assassination attempts, as their primary method of gaining power. If people cannot vote against violence, then there’s really no reason to vote at all, or pretend to legitimize a “Democracy”.
Take this however you wish.
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Thanks for expanding on your response. One thing I’m still curious about is the broader picture. My question wasn’t only about politically motivated violence, but about constant exposure to tragedy in general - things like natural disasters, mass displacement, ongoing wars, crime, abuse, and other forms of suffering that dominate the news.
Do you think repeated exposure to all of that shapes our emotional responses over time, regardless of political outcomes? And how do you see actions like voting translating into meaningful change across tragedies that aren’t tied to politics at all?
What about when someone really is a Nazi fantasist like you? You seem to be quite proud of it going by your comments. It’s very rare that I come across actual modern-day equivalents of Nazis. They stand out like dogs’ balls.
Btw, I was disgusted by Kirk’s murder too. According to you that means I must be an American right wing conservative christian. Try not to let your head explode with the effort of trying to make ‘sense’ of it 
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(15 characters)
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I think the news media itself has evolved hugely since I was a kid. I remember my parents use to watch it religiously at 6pm, the “BBC 6 O’Clock News”, and it was usually about coal miner strikes, IRA troubles or something happening in Beirut or elsewhere in the Middle East, there was actually very little reporting from the U.S. There was only four TV channels in total back then, and one of them was new, Channel 4, but most people went to the BBC to get the news. The presenter would describe things in a general manner, there was no gory detail, especially not any that was actually shown.
Then the “round the clock” news channels came along when I became an adult myself, the biggest being CNN, but BBC also has their own version. I remember watching live coverage of the 9/11 attacks as it happened, I was off work that day and just coincidentally had CNN on TV. That’s the first time I can remember watching the news and actually feeling deeply shocked, especially after seeing someone leap from one of the buildings to escape the flames, and realising that was an actual person who was plummeting to their death. News was no longer some family ritual, you could get it any time you wanted, although they didn’t always have all that much to say and repeated themselves quite a lot.
Now it’s a very different world, not just because of what’s happening, but because of how and why things are being reported. The news is pretty much inescapable if you spend any amount of time online, especially on social media platforms. Also, everyone has become a “reporter” of sorts, with a camera and microphone in every pocket, ready to broadcast to the world at a few swipes. It’s no longer that sober and restrained TV and radio news of the 80’s, it’s in your face, it’s constant, and it’s very detailed indeed.
For example, the woman that was shot by an ICE agent, if something had happened like that back then, it would have been reported in a very different way. They would definitely not have shown the footage just prior to the incident, they would have simply described it instead, there were certain boundaries that just weren’t crossed, and any scene filmed just before a person is about to die would not have been shown.
I’ve (accidentally) seen some pretty horrible things on the internet since I first dialled-up back in about 1994, but these days all of the horrible stuff I see is what is being reported as news and freely shared on social media. I don’t go looking for news anymore, it always finds me anyway, so what’s the point? I’m not a reporter or columnist so I don’t have to be one of the first to know. I just run across things second-hand, which is fine, because then it’s usually had the chance to be sanitised and analysed a bit. The news platforms are hugely biased and partisan these days – at least the propagandist BBC had the decency to pretend it wasn’t a UK govt. mouthpiece back in the 80’s. Now everybody is expected to take a side and declare it loudly.
Yes, people have undoubtedly become desensitised to violence and tragedy. The sheer amount of happenings we are bombarded with means we don’t have the chance to fully turn things over in our minds, to actually grasp the horror of some of it. I remember in the 80’s the Boomtown Rats wrote the song “I don’t like Mondays” about a school shooting, and my sister told me what it was about, and after that every time I heard the song it chilled me to the bone. Now you could put an entire album together in no time, read the killer’s manifesto, and watch footage of what happened prior, after, and during online. Some shooters even have devoted “fan clubs” of sorts.
I don’t really want to know what the future holds. A VR headset so you can experience the horror first-hand? I wouldn’t want to be a kid now. Think back to the childhood I described, and now think what they are exposed to at present. No wonder so many of them hide away in their rooms and away from society, I would too if I was young and surrounded by that much horror on a daily basis.
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I don’t know what the “fifteen characters” thing is about, though I keep seeing it pop up. That’s a nice poem, thanks for sharing.
It’s because each post on here has to have a minimum of 15 characters, so it’s to fulfil that.
Do you think the world itself is actually fundamentally more violent and chaotic than it was before, or does it feel that way largely because we live inside a constant, inescapable stream of news and commentary?
As you pointed out, it’s possible that the shift is not only in what is happening, but in how events are reported, repeated, amplified, and politicized. When everything is immediate, visual, and framed through partisan lenses, it can change our emotional and psychological relationship to events more than the events themselves.
In that sense, has reality actually changed more than our relationship to information about it?
I think they both directly influence each other. Governments and corporations will do whatever they feel like they can get away with, and these days they can get away with a hell of a lot.
The situation on the ground is dire, not only are people being bombarded with information and finding it difficult to focus on any single issue, they are herded onto social media where they feel they have a voice, when the truth is they are being put into a giant room to either argue or agree amongst themselves.
“Followers” are little more than fellow disgruntled people, the issues are outlined by the “influencers” and everybody agrees on how bad they are, but no one actually does anything tangible, least of all the influencers themselves, who have scant actual interest in affecting change besides farming for engagement and producing positive metrics for their accounts. They are not leaders, they are herders, and they do practically nothing to actually change anything, despite the influence they have.
The actual power-holders love this state of affairs, because first of all they don’t have to listen. When does Donald Trump or Elon Musk ever respond to negative tweets? They don’t even read tweets, it’s highly unlikely they even post anything themselves, they have people for that, many of them. Because they don’t even read what people post, they might as well not exist. People are shouting as loud as they can in a soundproofed room. Also they can tip the balance using bots or using the “algorithm” to promote one side over the other, a level of public discourse control that would have been impossible in the past.
I work with data and I understand it and how it can be harvested or manipulated. There are literally huge teams of people doing this, and multiple AI agents are analysing the online fallout from events, and if there looks like there will be too much resistance or action in a certain area, they inject an antidote which might be even more polarisation or even fake opponents to make the conversation look more balanced. They can also promote one thing over the other on their platform, or silence something else, and people will be fooled into thinking those things are prominent simply because they have more natural engagement, even though they have no actual way of proving this.
That’s why I think there are no historical comparisons to today, the world is just so different that whatever worked in the past certainly isn’t going to work now. I think the most important part is for people to understand they are being manipulated every time they log onto a platform, and to not trust the mechanisms used, because they really have no way of knowing what they are and how they are being manipulated and controlled.
The news is a completely different animal, and because of that we are seeing events that we feel powerless to oppose. Also people aren’t just concentrating on local or national events anymore, they are forced to focus on what’s happening all over the world, and it’s a very big world, so we’re all suffering from information overload. It’s a long way from Thatcher, the IRA and miner’s strikes, it’s everything at once.
Sorry about the novel 
Most people believe that civilization is the natural antidote to violence. That social, political and technological advancement makes us less barbaric, more rational, more human. We are taught that violence belongs to the past, the dark periods of history.
Today in modern and supposedly enlightened societies, we prefer to imagine that we have overcome these primitive impulses, but this belief, as comforting as it may seem, can be one of the most dangerous illusions of our time.
Violence has not disappeared with civilization. We all know that it has been incorporated as a functional tool within power structures. Modern society does not eliminate violence, it manages and camouflages it behind institutions and bureaucracies. Direct repression has given way to legal punishment and forced silence. But the logic remains the same. Identify an enemy, project our frustrations onto them and keep them marginalized to ensure the stability of the whole. This is not new.
Renee Gerard asserted that violence is the ritual heart of human culture. In his work, Violence and the Sacred, he argues that social cohesion has historically been built from mechanisms of rivalry and sacrifice. Society needs victims to remain united and these victims are chosen through a process that seems natural but is deeply conditioned. The elite throughout history has understood this game better than anyone. It is not that they try to eradicate violence, they just make sure it is never directed against themselves. The violence that surrounds us on social media, in public policies, in news reports, in discourses, is not a failure of the system, it is an essential part of its functioning. The modern individual often acts as an unconscious accomplice to violent systems, believing they are defending peace. The repression of violence, both individual and collective, generates only more sophisticated forms of aggression and more difficult to identify.
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Divide and conquer, we know a fair bit about it in Scotland thanks to our English beneficiaries. But now they have ultra-powerful tools to achieve that, and they can herd everybody to specific spaces online and get an instant overview of the situation.
Back in the day a moderate conservative could converse with a moderate liberal and they could find common ground as far as right and wrong and government policy was concerned. Now that rarely, if ever seems to happen, the liberals are seen as having blue hair and nose-rings and changing their gender every five minutes and coercing their kids to do the same. The conservatives are seen as gun-toting Christian fundamentalists who love war and violence and are stuck in the past.
What about all the people who don’t fit into those categories? Well they chose a side so they better accept the branding, regardless of how ridiculous it is.
I really liked what you said about “shouting in a soundproof room”. It’s a depressingly efficient description of modern discourse.
When information is constant, visual, and algorithmically nudged, it shapes our engagement long before reflection has a chance to show up. In that kind of environment, people aren’t so much disengaged as permanently occupied. Everyone is reacting, agreeing, arguing, refreshing, and scrolling. It all feels very active, even though almost nothing actually changes.
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I agree that violence hasn’t disappeared so much as been reorganized. What feels different now is how we encounter it. Even if the underlying patterns are old, the speed, volume, and visibility are new, and that seems to change how people experience it on a day-to-day level.
I am also thinking about exposure more broadly, not just violence as a social mechanism, but the constant stream of harm in general. Natural disasters, crises, conflict, and endless public discourse all arrive in the same feed, often with the same urgency and emotional framing.
The structure may be familiar, but the experience of it isn’t, and that shift feels important for how people process, respond, or eventually tune things out.
The elite does not want to end violence, it wants to ensure that violence never turns against it.
Just look at how the legal system operates. Laws are presented as impartial, but in practice, punishment is disproportionately applied to certain social strata. This logic extends to the media which carefully selects which violence will be shown, amplified or ignored.
Police repression is justified as maintaining order.
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When violence and catastrophes become a constant informational background, their emotional significance indeed diminishes. Within the ESGTRU framework, this is related to the fact that emotional response is an energetically costly mechanism for highlighting what is significant: under continuous exposure to extreme stimuli, the system either enters a state of overload or is forced to attenuate its response in order to maintain stability. Therefore, the initial weakening of emotional reaction more often represents a form of self-preservation rather than pathology.
A significant role here is played by the crowd effect. Mass consumption of the same tragic events leads to synchronization and averaging of emotional responses. Individual experience is replaced by a collective norm of reaction, in which emotional intensity decreases faster than the capacity for meaningful reflection. As a result, orientation shifts from personal rational evaluation to the prevailing emotional field.
The boundary between adaptation and degradation lies where emotions lose their connection to meaning. If reduced emotional response preserves the distinction between tragedy and normality, it constitutes adaptation. If, however, crowd inertia erases this distinction and regulation shifts toward physiological impulses, a loss of spiritual and rational regulation occurs. Within the ESGTRU framework, this can be interpreted as a consequence of disruptions in supragenetic and supramolecular regulatory mechanisms, which are compensated, in evolutionary perspective, by processes of territorial and genetic mixing.
Когда насилие и катастрофы становятся постоянным информационным фоном, их эмоциональная значимость действительно снижается. В логике ESGTRU это связано с тем, что эмоциональная реакция является энергетически затратным механизмом выделения значимого: при непрерывной подаче экстремальных стимулов система либо переходит в режим перегрузки, либо вынужденно снижает отклик ради сохранения устойчивости. Поэтому первичное притупление реакции чаще выступает формой самосохранения, а не патологией.
Существенную роль здесь играет эффект толпы. Массовое потребление одних и тех же трагических событий приводит к синхронизации и усреднению эмоциональных реакций. Индивидуальное переживание подменяется коллективной нормой реагирования, при которой эмоциональная интенсивность снижается быстрее, чем способность к осмыслению. В результате ориентация смещается от собственной разумной оценки к общему эмоциональному полю.
Граница между адаптацией и деградацией проходит там, где эмоции утрачивают связь со смыслом. Если ослабление реакции сохраняет различие между трагедией и нормой, это адаптация. Если же толповая инерция стирает это различие и регуляция смещается к физиологическим импульсам, происходит утрата духовной и разумной регуляции. В рамках ESGTRU это может рассматриваться как следствие нарушений супрагенетических и супрамолекулярных механизмов регуляции, компенсируемых в эволюционной перспективе процессами территориального и генетического смешивания.