What this episode is about
Charlie Kirk, a leading voice of the American conservative movement, was assassinated. After this tragedy, two things left me shaken in completely different ways: one was a deep, visceral sense of “disgust”; the other was a profound sense of “fear”.
Stephen King, the famous horror novelist, posted a tweet almost immediately after the incident—one that looked “perfectly logical” on the surface. Yet in that tweet, I could not find the slightest sympathy for the dead. All I saw was the cold-blooded opportunism of using a corpse as a platform to preach one’s own political agenda. This kind of “political blood-bread”—using tragedy to serve a political viewpoint—along with “selective empathy”, showing compassion only toward one’s own echo chamber, perfectly exposed the arrogance, hypocrisy, and intellectual laziness of part of the elite.
If Stephen King’s remarks represented the hypocrisy of the previous generation’s elite, then a street interview from the University of Texas at Austin showed me a terrifying picture of the future. In the video, those young students regarded as “the chosen of Heaven” displayed astonishing indifference to Charlie Kirk’s death. Their reaction was not gleeful Schadenfreude, but a numbness that made it seem as if they were discussing something unrelated to themselves—as though what had died was not a living, breathing person, but an unimportant symbol.
This indifference, more frightening than hatred, points to an extremely dangerous psychological phenomenon: dehumanization. When we stop seeing political opponents as “people”, almost any form of harm can start to seem justified. That is the ideological precondition behind countless large-scale atrocities throughout history.
All of this has made me wonder whether the fracture in American society has already reached a point with no bottom. When university campuses are filled with an atmosphere that dehumanizes people with dissenting views, I even found myself questioning, for the first time, whether I should still send my daughter to study in the United States.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
Jump to a section
- 00:00 Opening
- 00:39 What made me sick: Stephen King’s tweet
- 01:31 Reason for disgust #1: profiting politically from a corpse
- 02:57 Reason for disgust #2: hypocritical “selective empathy”
- 03:55 Reason for disgust #3: intellectual laziness and arrogance
- 05:07 Reason for disgust #4: the elite’s condescending posture
- 05:44 What terrified me: college students’ indifference
- 08:29 ”Dehumanization” is more frightening than hatred
- 09:28 Concerns about American university education
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