A city of NPC's

I was talking with Marie today, and an idea popped out of my mouth without my thinking about it. Maybe I had better explain what I mean.

Marie joined our Sangha last night; and during the discussion of the Dharma reading we talked (among other things) about how and why people in small towns distrust educated people from the Big City. A couple of different theories were advanced. 

This morning Marie picked up the topic again and we discussed it a while longer. Marie tried to argue that the reason rural people resist regulation (she assumed that they do) is that since nobody else lives nearby it's not "intuitively obvious" that restrictions on individual behavior help everyone by protecting us from each other. I suggested (on the contrary) that of course rural people understand that; but their idea of what restrictions make sense is based on their experience. Since their experience is different from the experience of urban folk, they will accept restrictions that urban folk reject and vice versa.

And then suddenly somehow I found myself talking about guns. What I told Marie was:

That's why there's a disagreement about guns. See, rural folk assume that their neighbors are a lot like themselves. They'll tell themselves, "I know how to handle a gun, I know how to treat it responsibly, and I know I won't shoot my neighbor—because he's a human being, and you don't shoot people. It's basic. So I trust my neighbor to do the same. But I don't trust the local mountain lions (or coyotes, or bears, or whatever) so I want to make sure I have a weapon to protect against them!"

On the other hand, city folk don't take that attitude because they are surrounded by thousands of strangers and don't even recognize them as human beings. We all know that the human brain can only cope with communities of about 150 or so: there's been research on that. So when you live in a city of hundreds of thousands of people—or millions, or even more—your brain shuts down. You stop processing those faces as real human beings. As far as you are concerned, they are just animals, or NPC's [Non-Playing Characters]. Therefore you can't trust them with guns, … and honestly they can't trust you either.

Only after I'd finished saying this did I realize what I had said. Wait … do I really believe that? Do I really believe that city-dwellers (like myself, for example) regard most of their fellows as empty faces who aren't fully human? It's a scary thought.

On the other hand, I can't convince myself that it is obviously wrong, either. And it provides an explanation for the quip so often attributed to Joseph Stalin: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." If the million are only NPC's, why should they be any more than a statistic?

Of course, if you are one of the million then things might not look so aseptic. As I say, it's a scary thought.