Killing Our Own With Apathy
A societal collapse of sorts has already occurred: human life no longer has value outside our own.
Overshadowed by The Covenant School massacre over a week-and-a-half ago was a distressing incident in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Here’s the rundown of the incident:
A man stabbed outside a Vancouver Starbucks on Sunday evening has died, and his alleged assailant has been charged with murder, Vancouver police say.
Paul Stanley Schmidt, 37, was stabbed outside the café at the corner of Granville and West Pender streets around 5:40 p.m. following a “brief altercation,” according to police.
Schmidt was rushed to hospital, where he later died.
The suspect, 32-year-old Inderdeep Singh Gosal, was arrested at the scene, and has since been charged with second-degree murder.
If you have the stomach for it, you can watch video of the incident here. WARNING: it’s bloody:
Schmidt’s killing was apparently the culmination of a dust-up that began when he asked Gosal to stop blowing smoke from his vape pen towards his family. It escalated into a brawl, resulting in the aforementioned stabbing that ended Schmidt’s life.
I don’t like assuming too much when details are scarce, yet I can’t help but think this was, indeed, intentional homicide. I can’t think of any justification, short of self-defense, that’d necessitate stabbing someone over an argument over vaping. There’s not much more to discuss on this point - if you’re going to employ lethal force, it better be because your life and well-being were truly at risk. My personal belief is that Gosal, the killer, felt his pride wounded when Schmidt asked him to quit vaping so close to his family. As my go-to personal safety expert, Marc MacYoung, said, most violence, short of outright criminality, is the product of out-of-control emotions. Indeed, Gosal had no criminal history prior to this incident. If he has any conscience, he ought to wish he would’ve just let it all go, even if he honestly believes he did nothing wrong.
Another the reason the story has attracted a lot of attention is because of the seeming indifference on the part of bystanders to the fact a man was just murdered in front of them. The person (I hate to call him that) who filmed the video posted above is apparently a TikToker named Alex Bodger who, in an act of horrendous callousness, then filmed and uploaded a video where he exclaimed, “This motherf**ker just died, bro. He just died, bro, holy f**k!” All with the bloodied, dying Schmidt clearly visible in the background.
Later, Bodger would try to rationalize his actions, only to conclude by saying, in a moment of unbelievable nihilism:
“Yeah, this s— [the stabbing], it doesn’t faze me too much. I’ll just say human life, to me, the way I look at it, if I don’t know you, is meaningless … he’s dead. What can we do now?”
Wow. What the hell is happening to people? What are we going to do about this?
But Bodger isn’t even the bottom, difficult as it might be to believe. Also gaining a lot of attention is a man seen sitting outside in the far right corner of the video frame. Just feet from the stabbing, he proceeds to sit there, minding his own business, sipping his coffee, as if it’s just another beautiful day in Vancouver. Watch the video again if you missed it, but if you’d rather not, look at the picture I used for this piece. Unbelievable, isn’t it?
Certainly, the last thing I want to do is tell people to get involved in a dangerous situation. I can’t do that. But for God’s sake, can people show something more than indifference to what’s just happened in front of them? I say “act,” because we all know he’s aware of what’s going on, it’s just that he’s either too scared or otherwise can’t be bothered to have his mirage of safety shattered in a moment of real-world violence.
Exercise caution, absolutely. I understand people may not want to attract the attention of a killer. I can also understand some of you might be put off by the sight of blood. I get it. What I don’t get is sitting there and pretending like nothing’s happening. I find that indefensible. I spoke a few posts ago about how our society is comprised of sheep, who live to be protected, wolves, who prey on the sheep, and the sheepdogs who confront the wolves in defense of the sheep. The guy sipping his coffee is obviously sheep, but he takes it to a whole new level when he can’t bring himself to recognize another human being is dying in front of him, as if it were just some lovers’ quarrel not meriting his interest.
If you think I’m being too hard on this sheep, imagine that was your family member bleeding out on the ground. Anyone who says they wouldn’t be infuriated by the apathy and obliviousness exhibited by the bystanders is a liar. If we’re going to live in a society, even an atomized one such as ours, we need to be able to expect something out of our fellow citizens beyond merely letting us be to live our lives. At least a show of concern, instead of withdrawn disinterest. Does Mr. Coffee-Sipper realize he cannot expect of others what he won’t provide for others? Or, does he live his life going all-in on the bet nothing bad will ever happen to him, like so many foolishly do?
This disturbing apathy isn’t an aberration. In San Francisco, Bob Lee, the 43-year-old founder of Cash App, was murdered with a knife on the morning of Tuesday, April 4. The San Francisco Standard reported that surveillance video showed Lee attempted to get help from a motorist, who refused to assist:
Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard shows Lee, who had already been stabbed, walking up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge at around 2:30 a.m. Lee crosses the intersection at Harrison Street and walks up to a parked white Camry with its hazard lights flashing.
Lee then lifts his shirt—as if to show the driver his wound and ask for help—and falls to the ground after the car drives away, the footage shows. He gets up and walks back toward the Bay Bridge before falling to the ground again outside an apartment building called the Portside.
At some point, Lee dialed 911 and repeatedly screamed for help, saying he needed to go to the hospital, according to the records reviewed by The Standard. Lee made the call at 2:34 a.m. and police arrived on the scene less than six minutes later.
Lee was unconscious when officers found him on the ground, police said.
Again, I don’t want to judge too harshly. Maybe the driver was genuinely shocked - after all, it was 2:30 am - and drove off in a panic. And yet again, at what point can we expect our fellow citizens to render a smidgen of assistance to a human being clearly in distress? Even if the driver didn’t want to open the door, they could’ve at least called 911 for the victim. If that were a woman or a child asking for help, would the driver have rendered assistance? What’s it going to take?
The point isn’t that either Schmidt’s or Lee’s lives would’ve been saved had a bystander provided immediate assistance. Both Schmidt’s and Lee’s wounds may have well been fatal, either way. It’s that we’ve come to value human life so little, we’re willing to watch people die right in front of us or abandon them to their fate out of what, exactly? Self-preservation? It used to be people felt shame and a belief that there exist fates worse than death. Life as a coward used to be something that kept people awake at night. Maybe it still does, but if so, you can’t tell, not from peoples’ actions
This is as much a spiritual as it is a social and political crisis for our civilization. I don’t mean spiritual in a religious sense, though, as you’ll see, religion plays a role. We, as a people, have lost our will to survive. Certainly, as individuals, we’re as afraid of dying as we’ve ever been (consider the overreaction to COVID), but as a nation, as a people, we could care less. Not all of this is nihilistic; much of the indifference stems from complacency, a belief that there’s just no way our society could ever collapse and that peace and order is the baseline norm, not conflict and disorder. In some ways, a new faith has emerged, rooted in the belief the world just “runs itself.” Certainly, you can’t live your life worrying about every little thing beyond your control and we all need to be able to trust, on some level, that everything eventually works itself out. But this should never be confused with the truth, which is that the world works only because an increasingly dwindling number of people are invested in it and care enough to show up and do the difficult work necessary to keep it running.
Tara MacIsaac of The Epoch Times writes about how the indifference seen in the Schmidt killing defies conventional explanations:
David Haskell, an associate professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Wilfred Laurier University, told The Epoch Times that this reaction is different from the so-called “bystander effect,” where individuals in a crowd freeze up because they think someone else will help the person in trouble, or because the situation is ambiguous and they’re not sure what to do.
“One of the things we might be seeing is what has been called the loss of ‘social capital,'” he said.
Social capital is a term in sociology that refers to the connectedness between people in society that allows it to function effectively. Haskell said the loss of social capital may be due to a breakdown of families, a loss of faith, or a weakened sense of community and trust.
“We’ll call it the breakdown in social cohesion in society,” he said. “Certainly, we are at a point in the history of the west where we’ve never seen such a significant breakdown in social cohesion.”
In other words, it’s not an overreaction to say this is no longer business as usual. A societal collapse of sorts has already occurred: human life no longer has value outside our own. Everyone’s a stranger in the most literal sense, every individual their own nation, and our interactions with others constitute a zero-sum game.
Indeed, it’s a uniquely Western problem and has a geographic aspect to it:
Eric Kaufmann, a Vancouver native and politics professor at the University of London, also cites the loss of social capital as playing a role.
“I think it’s indicative of this breakdown of society that we’re seeing across the West, but worse in North America, and worse especially on the West Coast,” Kaufmann told The Epoch Times.
More:
Certain characteristics of West Coast cities—from Los Angeles to Seattle to Vancouver—make them especially susceptible to a loss of social capital, Kauffman says.
More drifters—people who are less rooted—end up in these cities, partly because of the climate, he said. Also evident is “a sort of strain of progressivism that is more anarchist, more individualist, or expressive individualist,” Kauffman said. Expressive individualism places one’s inner desires and wishes above externally imposed mores or authority.
He gave the examples of policies that arise from this ideology: providing drugs to users, having lax rules around setting up camps in cities, releasing repeat offenders, and defunding the police.
“All these sorts of ideas contribute to a less ordered environment and contribute to increases in crime rates,” he said.
Progressives are in no position to decry this social breakdown. Their policy preferences, their vision of what a better society constitutes, when implemented, leads to disorder, more crime, and indifference for the well-being of others. It’s ironic, because it’s progressives and leftists, more generally, who seem most critical of individualism, yet in the real world, their policies cultivate ever more extreme forms of it. After all, you cannot build a society around the belief people should be allowed to do “whatever the f**k they want,” a mantra that’s become highly prevalent in our society.
I hope you’ll read the entire piece, because it unravels many threads, but I want to quote one more passage, because it touches on something I mentioned earlier:
Haskell cites additional factors, including a loss of religious beliefs and the principles that come with it.
“To the extent that society becomes irreligious, secular, or agnostic or atheist, there really is—the data is clear—there is a movement away from selflessness,” he said.
It’s taboo to say, but it shouldn’t be - Christianity is foundational to Western civilization and, by extension, American and Canadian society, to say nothing of the broader Anglosphere. We certainly didn’t get our norms, values, and mores from Islam or even atheism. You may not like Christianity, but every society needs a shared belief system, and diversity works only if all roads lead to a core, overarching belief that overcomes all differences. One need not be a Bible-thumping Evangelical to see we’ve all but kicked Chrstianity to the curb and there hasn’t been an adequate substitute. Is it any wonder our society no longer has a foundation upon which it rests and, as a consequence, we don’t view ourselves as part of a greater whole? This isn’t quantum physics.
More:
What’s missing is a sense that we’re “in it together,” Philip Salzman, professor emeritus of anthropology at McGill University, said in an interview.
When people witness something like a stabbing, it’s natural to hesitate or be uncertain about what to do to some degree, Salzman said. But it should be “balanced by a sense that they owe a fellow community member something, that they’re part of something larger, they’re in it together. That ‘in it together’ seems to have disappeared.”
Salzman cited a poll published in March, commissioned by the Wall Street Journal, that showed the extent to which patriotism, religious faith, and having children have fallen as priorities for Americans.
The results of the poll Salazman refers to can be distilled down to the following graphic:
It’s worth noting not everyone takes these results at face value, but ask yourself: are these results all that surprising? Do they or don’t they conform to impressions we’ve all had about our country for quite some time now? There’s always the risk of confirmation bias, but where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. The idea Americans have become demoralized and disconnected didn’t come out of nowhere.
It seems the only thing we have in common as Americans any longer is the pursuit of the almighty dollar, which may be losing it’s status as world reserve currency as we speak. Again, I think we all knew this to be true - there are no ties beyond making a living that bind us together - but it’s something else entirely to see it manifested in a survey. It’s scary, actually.
I’m repeating myself, but think we all intrinsically understand there’s something deeply wrong with our society and would prefer we’d be a more cohesive whole. I don’t believe there’s anyone out there who thinks this is the way it should be, it’s just that we each have our own ideas on how it ought to be. Some ideas make more sense than others, certainly, but my point is nobody looks around and thinks, “This is the way it should be!” I’m critical of the way we responded to COVID in 2020, but it was, for a while, an attempt at cultivating nationhood and unity which unfortunately backfired, immensely. Instead of putting our faith into our heritage, history, and belief in a higher power, we chose instead to worship “experts” and the government. With the election of President Joe Biden, this trend escalated, proving if there’s any higher power in our country today we’re all still permitted to worship, it’s the state.
If you haven’t noticed, we’re past the topic of personal safety, here. Far too many of us believe, foolishly, that authoritarianism and totalitarianism are the end result of prudes and party-poopers who can’t stand the sight of everyone else having a good time. That’s not how it happens. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are, instead, products of necessity or social vulnerability. Either a society becomes so destabilized and disorderly, dictatorship is the only way to keep it from disintegrating, or society has become so demoralized and faithless, those motivated by strong belief - like anti-racism and transgenderism - fill the void. The fatal flaw of the libertarianism which undergrids our society is that it creates a vaccum for authority, a vaccum that’ll be filled by anyone strong and dedicated enough to their cause. Always, that anyone happens to be a tyrant.
We love our individualism, but there’s always a part of us crying out for unity and someone more powerful than us who’ll tell us what to do. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this - a society cannot be sustained through individualism alone, a large measure of collectivism is always necessary - but the problem is, we aren’t being honest with ourselves. By insisting on our individualism and detachment from obligation in their most extreme manifestations, we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to those motivated by higher belief and harbor a willingness to take us all along for the ride.
What’s most scary is, if recent events have proven anything, it’s that we’ve been ripe for herding like never before. Don’t think it could never happen here, because it’s been happening all around us. We have yet to arrive at the final destination, but we can certainly see it from here. Remember: you may not care, but someone else always will.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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It changes when you leave the cities.
The apathy you describe has been endemic to urban life forever.
Kitty Genovese, rest in peace.