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SOCIETY | VALUE-BASED CHOICE FALLACY
Ammo and aid: Conflicting values in a world of destruction
(on the absurdity of sending aid to one and weapons to another)
Has it struck you too? — Open the news and all we see is destruction. Cities that have changed into rubble. But there is more. The rubble is what we see. What we don’t, is the human suffering that comes with it. About the suffering, we can only guess.
destruction and suffering
All destruction and suffering have in common that they are being inflicted. Upon us. In this, there is no point in looking for singular causes. Systems theory has taught us, over and over again, that singular, linear thinking is the sort of thinking that exclusively belongs to the pettiness of the human mind. Our minds depend on processing tools that allow for only so much broadband, only so much processing speed. Even if estimates suggest that the number of neurons in the human brain, along with the number of synapses (the connections between them), could allow for as many as 10¹⁴-10¹⁵ calculations per second, which is an absolutely unfathomable number — this is still not quite enough for us to take it all in. Or, at least not within a reasonable timeframe for calculation. Hence, our inherent tendency to oversimplify. Of all the billions of phenomena that lead to the…
