My theory is “shallow thinking” and “busy-ness”. We are prone to mental and expedient shortcuts which seem benign at the small scale in which we interact, but when aggregated become something terrible… and on the exceedingly rare chance that we might hear an actual solution, it either sounds so foreign to us that we cannot consider it, or so hopeless a fight that the super-majority of people do not push back.
Consider how slippery the slope is for even one aspect (diffuse responsibility):
Alice needs help
Bob sees that Alice needs help
Bob excuses himself from being the one to help (not prepared, wasn’t expecting, other obligations, could be a trap, others are better suited to help, the government ought to help)
Bob excuses himself from being the one to get help (I don’t have the number handy, someone else will call, she probably already called someone for help)
Conceptually, this is fine if it is ONLY “Bob”, but the deceptive part is how finite the procedural gap is between Bob being one person and it literally being everyone… thus Alice gets no help.
My theory is “shallow thinking” and “busy-ness”. We are prone to mental and expedient shortcuts which seem benign at the small scale in which we interact, but when aggregated become something terrible… and on the exceedingly rare chance that we might hear an actual solution, it either sounds so foreign to us that we cannot consider it, or so hopeless a fight that the super-majority of people do not push back.
Consider how slippery the slope is for even one aspect (diffuse responsibility):
Conceptually, this is fine if it is ONLY “Bob”, but the deceptive part is how finite the procedural gap is between Bob being one person and it literally being everyone… thus Alice gets no help.