The Benjamin Report

I wrote this essay on July 30th, 2025. I wrote it, then forgot about it. I don’t know what has occurred today (August 31st, 2025) that would’ve inspired me to look at it again and then decide to publish it. But I do think about this subject matter a lot, so I figure why not let it out.

A lot of unfortunate evils have been committed and marginalized under the pretext that the underlying foundations are too complicated for the layman to properly understand and the specialist to ultimately rationalize. By this devil, I mean stretches of violent conflict at home and abroad.

Israel-Palestine: the issue is complicated, the history dense, and ultimately any action on the issue must be employed with a delicate hand and an eye for greater diplomacy. The purveying influence here is the consequences of history, as if the people of today have lost all their personal agency and capacity of suffering and sadism to their fathers whose skeletons feed the worms, and whose own personal agency in their own time above ground was sold by a pact signed by their fathers: and so on and so forth for centuries. By this sad logic, my own life is withheld from me by an agent from long ago that I have never met, and who I don’t suppose would even care from me. What kind of truism is this if not total nonsense?

Not just in the Palestine-Israel conflict, but also the political frictions in America, in Europe, in Asia, in the Global South, in the places of business you frequent, the ones you don’t, and in your own relationship with your mother or father or any other person you’ve had any sort of acquaintance with. This isn’t a depreciation mechanism meant to trivialize great issues in the greater world, just a mode of understanding the rhetoric in place used from the top-down in dealing with anything that breaches the nervous boundary between personal and political.

Every human being on the planet is so near biologically identical that the word “near” should be treated as arbitrary in its use in this sentence. Psychologically, the methods of reasoning among us are the same. When we our born, they arrive, and we use them and retool them over and over in constant change until we die. With that in mind, a process of sympathizing with anybody else in our species is (or rather, should be) extraordinarily easy to do. It’s just a choice whether it is done or not.

The maladaptive influences on the decision to lend sympathy or not come near simultaneously with said decision’s moment of arrival: usually in the form of “thoughts and prayers to the people affected, this is not the time for politics”–or, infamously–“the issue at hand is really complex, best to leave it to the experts.”

There is no expert greater than ourselves to think rationally about the well-being of others. There is no expert that can tell you with better assurance that a human being needs food and water to merely survive, and shelter to protect them from cold and heat and bullets and murder.

When you see a man disemboweled, children with no limbs and blackened skin by fire, scars burrowed into the flesh of mothers, homes fouled with blood and shrapnel and screams and stink, a pleading masses marching forward and forward onto their deaths–what first thoughts invade your brain? Are you thinking of money and numbers, or do you think of terror? fear? sadness and pain? Do you not see yourself with charred skin and the world against you a thousand tons of hatred? Do you not understand?

Is it because you truly definitely don’t, or because you choose not to, or perhaps you have simply forgotten the possibility of real loss.