#63 When Killing Costs You Nothing, the Other Side Stops Being Human
Watch what happens when you no longer need to stand in the same room as the consequence of your decision. You do not become more rational. You do not become more efficient. You become someone who has stopped checking whether the thing you are acting on is still a person. This is not cruelty. Cruelty requires attention. What replaces it is something far more efficient: the slow, administrative conversion of a human being into a data point that either meets a threshold or does not. No one needs to hate anyone. The system simply stops requiring you to look. And because you are no longer required to look, you stop. Not out of malice — out of convenience. The man who must face his enemy keeps seeing him as a man, if only because the enemy might kill him first. Remove that danger, and what remains is not justice finally freed from fear. What remains is someone who no longer needs to treat the object of his action as capable of mattering.