Stay Up Close And Personal

Or lose your humanity. Some things should be handled up close and personal, or at least be dealt with as if it was up close and personal. Modern society and progressing technology has many effects on the way we live our lifes, but not all of them are progressing humanity.

_{source: DEFENSE.GOV}

One of the biggest effects on our lifes of the technologies we use every day is this: we move further and further away from the immediate effects of our actions, and as such erodes our morals, our ability to make a clear distinction between what's right and what's wrong. And that's without defining right and wrong rigidly. However, our ability to do wrong increases with the distance between us and the effects of our actions. All wars in human history have been fought up close and personal, up until the Great War; soldiers were sent abroad, to countries and people they didn't know much about, save the propaganda they heard from their governments, and were ordered to kill those unknown people up close and personal. It's an act that takes great conviction, to plunge a knife or bayonet into the flesh of a living, breathing person, whom you know has family and loved ones, and see them bleed to death before your eyes.

One of the biggest problems for military leaders in those days was to get young people killing each other; in many cases soldiers on all sides simply refused the ultimate act of ending another human beings life. You can train on rag-dolls all you want, you can stir up the hate with propaganda all you want, but rag-dolls and implanted hate are quite different from actually killing a human being. That's not easy at all, unless you've grown up in under violent circumstances and remain there all your life, or when you suffer a mental disorder of some sort. I always remembered the saying "it's easy to get the child out of the war, but hard to get the war out of the child" that I saw somewhere long ago in relation to the child soldiers that were used in one of Africa's wars.

But technology caught up and in all consequent wars most killing was done from a distance; air raids and bombardments became the flavor of the day, and it isn't nearly as hard to throw down a bomb on miniature houses and roads. It's as if the people aren't even there because they're literally invisible from that distance. This has led to the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; I've listened to an interview with one of the pilots, I believe it was somewhere in the 1980s or 1990s, maybe even later, and he still did not regret what he did that fateful day.

After the Second World War, with the development of ever more powerful and sophisticated computer technologies, we found a way to help the soldiers overcome their reluctance of killing up close and personal, the relatively small portion that was left for the ground troupes; video-games were used to make shooting an enemy combatant an automatic reflex. This was an act of distancing on a purely psychological level. And now? Now we have drone-wars, where the killing is done from behind a computer screen from great distance, making it a video-game indeed.

And it's not just war, dear reader. Think about the stock market and the hedge-funds and the speculation; this is not a REAL economy, nothing is created. Pushing numbers on those screens have huge effects on people's daily lifes, companies are merged, massive layoffs follow, thousands of lifes destroyed, families disbanded.. But all that is out of sight of the ones pushing those numbers. Think about the echo-chambers from which we yell at each other on online social platforms, how easy it is to troll, offend, "dislike" when we're not up close and personal. Just something to ponder on ;-)

_{The Secret History of Videogames & The Military}

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