All These Simultaneous Disasters Are Messing With Our Brains
The earthquakes and wildfires and wars keep piling up. When does our empathy run out?
Last week, the psychologist Steven Taylor was at a socially distanced get-together with some relatives and their friends when the conversation turned to the chaos in Afghanistan. Someone mentioned the sickening footage of desperate Afghans clinging to American military aircraft as they departed. Then one man made a remark that caught Taylor off guard: The videos, he said, were funny. Others agreed.
Taylor was appalled. It was one of the most disturbing things he’d heard all week. Worse, he doesn’t think it was an isolated instance of casual sadism. Taylor studies disaster psychology at the University
