No one should ever watch any war videos

Submit instead to the fact that when you do, your best human impulses lead you in horrible anti-human directions

It seems that by the stage in its neurological evolution, the human ape should have learned to broadly resist drawing binary conclusions in the always-fuzzy area of morality. And in 2023, this “should” be especially true in contexts where every sanctioned information-provider has undertaken a transparent effort to slap everyone who merely has an opinion on a charged issue with one of two labels: FRIEND or ENEMY.

This is true whether the person with the opinion is concerned about increased crime in her own city or distressed about people being mass-murdered ten time zones away. You are either GOOD or BAD when it comes to masks and vaccines (either you believed “the science” or you wanted to murder your neighbors), “social justice” (you’re either a white supremacist or a white-bashing “anti-racist”; you’re either in favor of full-on perversion or someone who thinks trans people “don’t even have the right to exist”), Ukraine (either you’re a “puppet of Putin” or you support the preservation of democracy, albeit by white supremacists in places ruled by dictators) and January 6 (which was either a clear state-security trap—that is, an inside job—or it was a literal insurrection, coup, treasonous uprising, etc.).

I obviously pay attention to the mainstream media and fetch a lot of headlines from their websites, but I almost never watch “news” on television and literally never watch video footage of people being killed or wounded in acts or war. Of all the ways to be sucked into forming unexamined opinions you will quietly feel shame over having at some point, and be catalyzed into saying or writing something you’re almost certain to regret in a few years, it’s subjecting yourself to coverage of wars and warlike attacks on human citizens from the mass media, or in fact from anyone.

My brain isn’t equipped to process putting mass violence into any kind of context ass I am watching it happen. None of the political-science, Western military, or foreign-policy expertise matters to anyone, in fact, at these moments. You’re in a bad place as it is if you are forming opinions based on what you watch on television or read on sites like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or any off the “Big Three” U.S. network stations.

Starting very shortly after 9/11/2001, I and everyone else who watched the American media of the day were being rapidly trained to despise and mistrust anyone who so much as looked Middle Eastern (not that this had to be woven out of whole cloth). It wasn’t uncommon to hear previously disinterested people make casual remarks in supermarket lines about turning the entire region into a sheet of glass and so on. Then, when the U.S. inevitably declared war on Iraq in 2003, news consumers were primed to not blink when the U.S. unloaded its “shock and awe” campaign on Baghdad, killing untold numbers of Iraqi civilians.

I just won’t watch that stuff anymore; it’s bad enough that it’s a turn-off at a visceral level, but far worse is knowing that millions of decent people who share that gut-level reaction when seeing images of humans being marauded and extinguished will keep watching these images and become convinced that certain groups of people, maybe whole territories, should be eliminated wholesale because they’re all ghouls.

If people were naturally ghouls, normies couldn’t be manipulated into thinking this way. But most of us, as flummoxed and agitated and hopeless and emotional as we can be, are not in favor of seeing anyone suffer, including their enemies and “enemies” (the group in scare-quotes always vastly outnumbering the former). It’s natural for a well-adjusted human mind to abhor violence coupled to injustice and naturally seek a path to vengeance, as at some level this is rooted in wanting to see those we love and are connected to protected at all costs.

I vehemently, even categorically advise against watching cable “news” other than for pure research purposes anyway. But again, even if I’m a day too late for Global Mental Health Day, I cannot stress enough how toxic war coverage is for the human forebrain, especially in the early stages of newly declared ones, but really anytime.

Go outside and look instead and land that isn’t being burned or being strafed or stolen or otherwise disrupted because sadly, the human race has always featured people with an unabating desire to be Kings of the rest of us and an unflinching willingness to do what it takes in any technological context to get there. Go out and move around and do what human bodies are made to do while your mind takes in vistas it can at least process without fraying at the seams.