In the gunwalking incident, our government appointed itself to operate in an experimental manner without regard for the consequences to human beings. But it did this in part because we are a society that demonstrably tolerates government operating on that premise. We relate to each other in increasingly abstract, categorical terms—as quantities in a system, filtered by income level, race, sex, political affiliation; by the status of victim or oppressor; by ideological significance versus ideological insignificance—and we see it as increasingly normal for our government to relate to us in those terms as well.
This can justly be considered a form of spiritual sickness. But imagining that there is a collective, systematic "cure" for it would amount to committing the very error we decry. Government policies are the opposite of a remedy in this case. Indeed, the great adventure of our age may well be finding the way to de-privilege the whole premise of such solutions, which have come to fill our philosophical horizon. Policy criteria like statistics and tactical utility, however well we think we can assess them, have not turned out to be a basis for wisdom, hope, or virtue in human affairs. They encourage us instead to ignore the moral value of the individual, and treat each other as means to an end.
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