-Essays And Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer

“The idea of good and evil has nothing to do with religion or a mystic conscience. It is a natural need of animal races. And when founders of religions, philosophers, and moralists tell us of divine or metaphysical entities, they are only recasting what each ant, each sparrow practices in its little society. Is this useful to society? Then it is good. Is this hurtful? Then it is bad.”

— Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality

"Hell is other people"

-Jean Paul Sartre, in No Exit, a 1994 existentialist French play

These almost never look like the post edits. This is all a sham.

Canon m50, f5.6 15-45mm

Quantum mechanics posits that the world essentially operates on probability. But you know what else operates on probability?

(Wrong answers only)

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”

— Bertrand Russell (via knittingandphilosophy)

“The universe may forget us, but our light will brighten the darkness for eons after we’ve departed this world. The universe may forget us, but it can’t forget us until we’re gone, and we’re still here, our futures still unwritten. We can choose to sit on our asses and wait for the end, or we can live right now. We can march to the edge of the void and scream in defiance. Yell out for all to hear that we do matter. That we are still here, living our absurd bullshit lives, and nothing can take that away from us. Not rogue comets, not black holes, not the heat death of the universe. We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live. The universe may forget us, but it doesn’t matter. Because we are the ants, and we’ll keep marching on.”

— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

Art by Roberto Diaz.

The Bystander Apathy

“Studies show that bystanders choose to remain passive in a case such as Kitty’s because they recognize it as, for example, a husband ‘beating up’ his wife– ‘family problems’. Thinking they have no say in it and that it isn’t their problem, bystanders decide to watch instead of helping. Because, as Nietzsche has said, other people’s suffering is strange to us. It is unknown- it is a foreign concept to us.”

According to Nietzsche’s philosophy, a crowd’s morality is life-denying. Reading about this topic made me think about the macabre death of Katherine Genovese. Incredibly close to help yet so far away.

But what causes this “Bystander Effect”?

Decades prior to the bystander apathy theory being created, Nietzsche had heavily critiqued ‘the morality of the crowd’ and our human values. Talking about topics such as activism, altruism and volunteerism and pointing out the fact that people were becoming more individualistic and less giving. Everything in our lives affects this. Whether that is the way our parents educate us, what we are taught at school and what ideals we learn about during our early years in life.

The Bystander Effect, otherwise known as The Bystander Apathy is a phenomenon where a bystander is less likely to offer help to a victim if there are other people around, or if otherwise, they are in a crowd. Boiling it down to a few points, the reason why this happens is because people will start avoiding responsibility or they will try to act as everyone else around them. Otherwise, their behavior completely changes from the latter when they’re put in an uncomfortable position as to not seem ‘rude’. The bystander’s behavior also changes depending on if a person is alone or with somebody.

The theory was spawned during the ‘60s after Kitty’s death. A woman getting no help while a killer attacks her even though 38 bystanders were there. So why did none of them intervene? Why did they let her die in such a manner when all of them together were able to fend off the offender?

Studies show that bystanders choose to remain passive in a case such as Kitty’s because they recognize it as, for example, a husband ‘beating up’ his wife– ‘family problems’. Thinking they have no say in it and that it isn’t their problem, bystanders decide to watch instead of helping. Because, as Nietzsche has said, other people’s suffering is strange to us. It is unknown- it is a foreign concept to us.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices.

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity (via philosophybits)

This isn’t anything anyone can’t logically deduce, Russell must’ve been a lonely man. 

mourning