The Distance Between Us
- SU
- Jun 4
- 13 min read
There is an old saying that…
A single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths are a statistic. —Some Dead Person
The statement described something disturbingly accurate and uncomfortable about human nature: humans can be remarkably compassionate toward individuals and remarkably indifferent toward abstractions of people.
We will stop to help a stranded neighbor.
Bring food to a grieving friend.
Stay awake all night beside a sick loved one.
Yet when suffering is presented on a screen packaged into statistics, demographics, voting blocs, political narratives, the perspective changes.
The person disappears, replaced by a category, a box identity.
Possibly one of the greatest dangers facing civilization today.
Psychic numbing.
When Humanity Becomes Abstract
Recent debates surrounding human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and government transparency reveal an important pattern…
The moment a crime becomes politically inconvenient, “important key players” stop asking what happened and begin asking which side benefits from acknowledging it.
Victims become secondary.
Narratives become primary.
The tragedy is no longer measured by the harm inflicted on human beings but by its potential impact on political tribal ideology.
Imagine a father whose daughter is assaulted by a member of his affiliated political party.
Do you imagine he would shrug it off and say, “That’s okay, as long as we share the same ideological belief system”?
Absolutely not.
Imagine a progressive parent whose child is harmed by someone associated with a cause they support like LGBT or abortion rights.
Would they dismiss the crime because the perpetrator aligned with their social identity?
Not likely.
(But possibly a few)
The moment suffering becomes personal, ideology sublimates.
What remains is the human reality beneath them.
A child.
A family.
A friend.
A victim.
A wound.
Trauma.
Yet when the same event occurs far away, involving strangers we will likely never meet, perception changes, especially on the news, on a screen, in a different country…
It is like a sneak peak into another dimension.
(Because in a sense, it is one.)
When people process an event through the lens of identity rather than empathy….
The victim becomes a statistic.
The crime becomes a talking point.
The human being disappears.
Psychic numbing is what happens when human beings become abstractions.
Because they become seemingly unreal.
The Physics of Separation
The farther away we get from the human scale, the easier it becomes to justify things we would never tolerate face-to-face.
It is about distance.
Distance between:
decision and consequence,
action and accountability,
suffering and awareness,
people… and people.
People… and reality.
The social version of signal attenuation.
The signal is strongest at close range.
The farther it travels through bureaucracy, ideology, media, institutions, parties, and incentives, the weaker the original human reality becomes.
Eventually all that’s left is noise.
The real argument isn’t…
“Those people are the problem.”
Because the tendency exists in humanity.
What Happens to Tribal Nature When it Becomes Unnatural?
Humans generally prefer villains.
Villains are convenient.
They allow us to imagine a problem exists somewhere else, which is better than in front of us.
The more uncomfortable possibility is that the mechanism is universal.
Give any tribe enough power, enough distance, enough certainty, and enough abstraction, and the risks become detached from the people it was created to serve.
Religions.
Democrats
Republicans.
Corporations.
Governments.
Activist movements.
Media organizations.
Scientific institutions.
The tendency remains.
The form changes.
A person can only truly understand what is close enough to touch. —SU
Not perfectly, of course.
Humans can care about distant strangers.
But our empathy evolved locally and must be consciously extended globally.
That takes thought and the human brain is inherently lazy.
If we fail to evolve with empathy, the world becomes a collection of arguments instead of a collection of people.
And that’s when ideology becomes more important than the daughter, the son, the victim, the neighbor, or the friend. Not because it is good, but because it can subtly remove the human from humanity.
The irony is that technology was supposed to bring humanity closer together.
In many ways it did.
In other ways it gave us a front-row seat to every tragedy on Earth while simultaneously turning those tragedies into content.
A strange achievement, even by human standards.
But…
“What if we remembered that every issue eventually lands in someone’s living room?”
It’s difficult to stay tribal once you do.
This phenomenon extends beyond politics.
Nature itself teaches a similar lesson.
Signals weaken with distance.
Light spreads.
Sound fades.
Chemical concentrations diffuse.
Gravitational influence decreases.
The universe appears to be built upon relationships whose influence diminishes as separation increases.
Human relationships are no different.
Abstraction creates detachment.
Detachment creates apathy.
Apathy releases the human…
from the act of being humane…
from humanity.
Politics take advantage of a reasonable human instinct.
People naturally seek groups that share their values and concerns.
The problem begins when loyalty to the tribe becomes greater than loyalty to the truth.
At that point, standards are conditional.
Purely transactional.
And to many, this is a common belief and practice…
Because many let their right hand know what their left hand is doing.
The same behavior is condemned when committed by opponents and excused when committed by allies.
The same victim is believed when convenient and questioned when inconvenient.
The same principles suddenly acquire exceptions.
History demonstrates that no ideology is immune from this tendency.
Every movement eventually faces the temptation to protect itself rather than protect the people it claims to serve.
When that happens, humanity tends to become subordinate, clinging to identity.
And that is where people loose their principles.
The Achilles Heel
Take the last few days for example…
A perfect time for the world stage to put on a circus.
Everyone playing the main character in their own play.
Another Epstein congressional hearing where the victims aren’t heard, but weaponized in a non-redacted information dump, while the perpetrators are completely redacted from the conversation.
Meanwhile, the president bombs Iran, then promises them a third of a trillion dollars, and asks the prime minister of Israel “are you fucking crazy?” on a leaked call while he signs a covenant giving the DoD carte blanche… on AI technology before it is unleashed onto the public.
A hearing about stacking and manipulating the DoJ while ignoring the 1200 victims in an adjacent conference room waiting for justice.
Just in time for the primary vote.
It couldn’t have been choreographed better.
There’s definitely an irony to it.
People will assume the choice is between:
A vast, brilliantly coordinated conspiracy by lizard people.
Or…
Complete normal governance.
But it is more like…
Competing factions of imperfect humans pursuing incentives while trying to maintain power, status, influence, and narratives.
Which often looks chaotic because it is chaotic.
The human mind dislikes chaos.
We prefer coherent stories.
If events seem contradictory, we instinctively look for a hidden script.
But mostly what we’re seeing is a collection of powerful institutions attempting to solve their own problems, protecting their own interests, and managing their own risks, creating outcomes that appear coordinated from a distance.
From a systems perspective, trust is the issue.
When institutions are trusted, people assume mistakes are mistakes.
When institutions lose trust, people assume mistakes are evidence.
And once that transition occurs, every contradiction becomes suspicious.
Every delay… concealment.
Every redaction… protection.
Every firing… retaliation.
Every coincidence… intentional.
That’s not because people just become irrational.
It’s because credibility has been spent down over decades.
The integrity is lost.
Think of it as reputational capital.
A bank can survive a temporary loss if it has reserves.
An institution can survive a mistake if it has trust.
But if trust reserves are depleted, even routine actions trigger panic.
The Epstein saga is a perfect example.
Even if tomorrow an official explanation emerged for every delay, redaction, and procedural error, many people would remain skeptical because the skepticism isn’t solely about Epstein anymore.
It’s about the accumulated distrust from years of contradictory messaging, political maneuvering, selective transparency, media failures, intelligence scandals, financial crises, and institutional self-preservation.
The result is a negative feedback loop:
Institutions become the enemy.
Public suspicion increases.
Institutions become more secretive and defensive.
Trust decreases further.
Suspicion increases...
Round and round it goes.
And this is where the achilles heel comes in.
Power often assumes its greatest vulnerability is opposition.
Historically, that’s rarely the case.
The greater threat is usually loss of legitimacy.
People will tolerate mistakes.
People will tolerate inefficiency.
People will tolerate disagreement.
What they struggle to tolerate is the belief that rules are being applied differently depending on who is involved.
Once that perception takes hold, even fair decisions begin look unfair.
The circus analogy fits because every performer is focused on their act, their audience, their spotlight.
Meanwhile the tent itself starts sagging.
The audience doesn’t necessarily know what’s happening behind the curtains. But they can see the poles wobbling.
And when enough poles wobble at once, people start wondering whether the tent is unstable or whether they’re finally noticing how unstable it always was.
The dangerous part isn’t that people ask questions.
The dangerous part is when nobody believes the answers anymore.
That’s a much harder problem to solve than any individual scandal. And unfortunately, human institutions tend to discover that only after they’ve spent years treating credibility as an inexhaustible resource. It isn’t. Once trust is burned, rebuilding it takes far longer than destroying it.
That’s honestly closer to the historical baseline than many people realize.
One of the great disappointments of adulthood is discovering that the people running enormous institutions are just people with big egos.
People with blind spots.
People with incentives.
People with mortgages.
People with ambitions.
As children, many of us imagine that somewhere there is a room filled with wise elders carefully steering civilization.
Then you get older, work inside large organizations, sit in enough meetings, read enough reports, and eventually arrive at a different conclusion:
“Wait… these are the people making the decisions?”
Scientists experience this.
Engineers experience this.
Military personnel experience this.
Government employees experience this.
Academics experience this.
You spend years imagining a hidden layer of competence and then discover that many systems survive because thousands of ordinary people are doing their jobs despite the chaos above them.
The funny thing is that the explanation is often more parsimonious than a grand conspiracy .
A conspiracy requires:
coordination,
secrecy,
competence,
discipline,
long-term planning.
Incompetence requires none of those things.
It arrives fully assembled.
And yet, the irony is that enough incompetence can create outcomes that look conspiratorial from the outside.
If five agencies are protecting themselves, ten politicians are protecting their careers, twenty media outlets are chasing clicks, and fifty activists are pushing narratives, the resulting mess can appear orchestrated even if nobody is actually steering the ship.
It’s like watching a shopping cart with one broken wheel careen across a parking lot.
People keep asking, “Who is pushing that thing?”
Personally, what I find exhausting isn’t the politics...
It’s the performance.
I have spent years in science, research, consulting, knowledge management, and the military.
So I ask…
What happened?
What is the evidence?
What are the incentives?
What are the consequences?
Modern political discourse asks…
Which narrative hurts them?
Which narrative helps us?
Which team are you on?
Those are very different conversations.
One seeks understanding.
The other seeks victory.
And if you’re not emotionally invested in either tribe, the whole thing starts to resemble a group of drunken sports fans screaming at a television while the world is crumbling.
Personally, I care more about my fence-line that needs to be replaced.
A fence doesn’t care about ideology.
The orchard doesn’t care about polling data.
The chickens don’t care about congressional hearings.
The rain falls on Republicans and Democrats with equal enthusiasm.
That is what makes this shit show profound.
Humans built a civilization so complex that many people now spend their days arguing about abstractions while forgetting how to grow food, repair things, make music, care for neighbors, or sit quietly with their own thoughts.
This is why I am uncomfortable watching it.
I have spent enough time close to reality that the theater like a theater.
And once you notice the stage lights, it’s hard to go back to believing the play is real.
Long before screens, feeds, algorithms, polls, notifications, and endless digital reflections, there was fire. 🔥
It doesn’t require a profile.
It doesn’t care about followers.
It doesn’t reward outrage.
It simply burns.
There is something deeply grounding about watching matter return to simpler forms.
Wood becomes flame.
Flame becomes heat.
Heat becomes light.
Light disappears into the night.
And the charcoal in the morning is biochare for the compost.
Nature reflects something simpler:
Life and death.
Cause and effect.
Growth and decay.
Season and consequence.
Perhaps that’s why so many people who spend years inside institutions eventually seek woods, oceans, farms, gardens, workshops, or mountains.
After enough time navigating artificial systems, reality itself starts feeling luxurious.
Almost unnecessary.
A day spent around abstractions:
policies,
budgets,
headlines,
algorithms,
narratives
politics,
When Friday night arrives…. I light the fire.
The smoke rises.
The greenhouse catches the last light of dusk.
The frogs and crickes sing somewhere in the darkness.
And for a few hours, the world reduces itself to things that are undeniably real.
Air.
Fire.
Earth.
Water.
No tribes.
No circus.
No infinite mirrors.
Just the original one.
The same mirror that reflected humanity long before we learned how to manufacture new ones. And despite all our technology, it still seems to tell the truth better than most of them.
We just have to reflect the light to the future we want.
Energy bending in a biological meatsuit.
In a sense, much of life is deciding where to point the light.
Attention. Effort. Time. Care.
The same person can spend an evening feeding outrage, feeding fear, feeding envy.
Or they can spend it writing, teaching, building, planting, creating, helping, loving, learning.
Same energy.
Different direction.
Humans often act as though power comes from generating light, when much of our influence comes from reflecting it.
For all our philosophy and technology, a remarkable amount of human experience is still influenced by hydration, hormones, blood sugar, sleep, stress, and whether the nervous system feels safe.
The biological machinery matters.
But we don’t control every circumstance.
We don’t control every signal entering our life.
We don’t control the circus.
We do control, to some degree, where our attention goes and what we amplify.
A fire doesn’t illuminate the entire forest.
It illuminates the space around it.
The people near it.
The things within reach.
Maybe that’s closer to how humans are meant to operate than trying to carry the weight of every conflict, scandal, outrage, and ideological war happening across the planet.
Not because the wider world doesn’t matter.
Because a finite creature can only meaningfully direct so much light.
The rest becomes glare.
So while much of the world is arguing about which mirror is the correct mirror, I will be sitting by a fire on my farm, tending a greenhouse, writing stories, making music, and trying to understand reality one piece at a time.
A surprisingly respectable use of a temporary arrangement of carbon, water, minerals, and electrical impulses hurtling through space on a spinning rock.
Humanity has certainly chosen stranger hobbies.
Tension, Pressure, and Structure Emerge from Opposing forces Everywhere
A star exists because two tendencies are fighting:
Gravity pulls inward.
Radiation and thermal pressure push outward.
Neither wins completely.
The star is the consequence of their temporary balance.
Likewise, a tree grows because competing processes coexist:
Growth and decay.
Construction and consumption.
Order and disorder.
Too much pressure and the system collapses.
Too little pressure and it never organizes.
Carbon becoming diamond is a beautiful example. The carbon atoms don’t become valuable because they’re free. They become diamond because they are subjected to extraordinary pressure and temperature, forcing a new arrangement.
Yet the opposite is also true.
Life itself doesn’t usually flourish at diamond-forming pressures.
A healthy forest requires gradients, cycles, exchange, decomposition, and renewal.
Too much compression and life disappears.
Many stable systems seem to exist in a region between extremes:
Too much order becomes rigidity.
Too much freedom becomes chaos.
Too much compression becomes collapse.
Too much expansion becomes dispersion.
The interesting question is whether this applies beyond matter.
Social systems exhibit something similar.
A government can become so centralized and dense that information stops flowing properly.
Decisions become detached from local reality.
Conversely, a society can become so fragmented that coordination becomes impossible.
The healthiest ecosystems, economies, and communities often occupy a middle ground where there is enough structure to maintain coherence and enough freedom to adapt.
If we think of humanity as a network, excessive concentration of power increases pressure at the center while weakening local responsiveness.
Too much dispersion weakens collective action.
The challenge becomes maintaining tension without rupture.
We are taught the universe is “expanding into nothing.”
Nature rarely expands into nothing.
It expands into possibility.
A seed doesn’t become a tree because it escapes all constraints. It becomes a tree because it interacts with soil, water, sunlight, microbes, seasons, and time. Growth emerges from relationship, not isolation.
Perhaps the universe is less a collection of isolated objects floating in emptiness and more a hierarchy of relationships operating at different scales.
Atoms, cells, organisms, ecosystems, societies, and galaxies all seem to be negotiating the same fundamental problem:
How much tension is required to create structure without destroying it?
Humans tend to think of tension as a problem. Nature uses it as a tool. The string of a guitar produces music only because it is stretched.
Too loose and there is no note. Too tight and it snaps.
The trick, whether for stars, forests, governments, or people, appears to be finding the tension that creates harmony rather than fracture. The universe seems oddly fond of that narrow region between collapse and chaos.
(I know… I have almost lost my original point)
While life seems chaotic… it really isn’t.
It takes the length of change to understand an end result.
The Missing Human Scale
Our institutions have grown larger than our ability to emotionally process them.
Human beings evolved in villages.
Our nervous systems were designed for face-to-faces, not populations on a screen.
We understand our family, friends, and neighbor’s pain.
We struggle to comprehend the suffering of millions.
As governments expand, decisions become increasingly distant from the people affected by them.
Corruption exists at every scale.
accountability tends to weaken as distance increases.
The integrity decreases.
This is why society, and humanity, would benefit from returning more decision-making power to local communities…
because wee would remain closer to the human beings affected by their decisions.
The shorter the distance between action and consequence, the stronger accountability tends to become.
Is Recovering Humanity Possible?
The central problem facing humanity is not ideological disagreement.
Disagreement is inevitable.
The problem is forgetting that there are human beings behind every issue.
Every statistic contains faces.
Every victim belongs to someone.
Every number represents a life.
The moment we lose sight of that perspective, we become vulnerable to the same mistake repeated throughout every epic…
Protecting narratives more than truth.
Once humanity becomes abstract, compassion follows.
Civilizations don’t collapse because they lose their intelligence.
They collapse because they lose their humanity.
The signal is strongest at close range.
The farther it travels through bureaucracy, ideology, media, institutions, parties, and incentives, the weaker the original human reality becomes.
Eventually all that’s left is noise.
“What if we remembered that every issue eventually lands in someone’s living room?”
It’s difficult to stay tribal once you do.
The SAD END War has been raging for over a decade…
And very few have noticed that is is almost at their front door.
