“society doesn’t operate because we love everybody. society operates through sanction, through forms of collective control, through hierarchy, through the imposition of controlled forms of mass hysteria. y’know, so the novels that persuade you in the idea that everybody is intrinsically loveable are pulling off a confidence trick, as are the moral systems that delude people, you see it time and time again laurie and you know it’s true. people’s capacity for empathy with people who are outside their immediate social matrix is remarkably small and it doesn’t matter whether you call on this through- you validate it through evolutionary psychology, or you pull up stanley milgram’s experiments at yale or whatever it is, or the genocidal impulse that seems to exist in humanity, these are true facts. the thing is that people will hear these arguments and they’ll say ‘yes but you know, we’ve got to aim for something better than that’, but what would that world be like in which you empathised with six and a half billion people? what would the world be like if you felt the pain of the two hundred and fifty thousand people who were rubbed out in haiti a few weeks ago? what a strange place it would be.”
– will self, in conversation with laurie taylor
Star turn.