The Goat Pen

eCat wrote: After the cops leave, the roommate goes over to some other employees apartments, calls me and we discuss what he should do. I put him and employee zeta up in a local hotel. So he goes back to see employee zeta and when he arrives there is a maintenance man in the apartment wearing a white haz mat suit with a shop vac. He is also mad as hell asking how in the world so much shit could be everywhere.

The maintenance man was a real trooper and had the apartment back in livable condition with new carpet by the next day so they only had to stay in a hotel one day.

I never heard this story until last night, 3 weeks after we let the kid go.

Paul Slovic, one of the pioneers of research into the way we perceive risk, calls this greater concern for the one than the many "a fundamental deficiency in our humanity." As the world watches but, insufficiently moved, fails to act to prevent mass starvation or stop genocides in Congo or Kosovo or Cambodia or so many more, who would not agree with such a lament. But as heartless as it seems to care more about the one than the many, it makes perfect sense in terms of human psychology. You are a person, not a number. You don't see digits in the mirror, you see a face. And you don't see a crowd. You see an individual. So you and I relate more powerfully to the reality of a single person than to the numbing faceless nameless lifeless abstraction of numbers. "Statistics," as Slovic put it in a paper titled "Psychic Numbing and Genocide", "are human beings with the tears dried off." This tendency to relate more emotionally to the reality of a single person than to two or more people, or to the abstraction of statistics, is especially powerful when it comes to the way we perceive risk and danger, because what might happen to a single real person, might happen to you. As the familiar adage puts it, "There but for the grace of God go I."

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
-- (attributed to) Joseph Stalin