Hmm, yes. I often ponder how our standard of life gets better and better, and at the same time, the scale of systematic violence we perpetrate against our fellow human and fellow animal gets larger and larger. There are many acts of individual violence that I am horrified by, yet I don't lose my faith in humanity over, as I understand they are single incidents. What does make me lose faith in humanity is things like genocide and the animal industries. What makes me lose faith in nature, or God, if He exists, is the sheer endless cycle of violence and destruction required to sustain life on Earth, an infinite game of cat-and-mouse for all of the planet's inhabitants. I sometimes feel very guilty about being human, in the sense that I cause ecological destruction simply by existing. I suppose that wasn't my choice.
We're all so thin-skinned, though. I love barn owls. They regularly eat their own babies. I have to wonder how the barn owl is not rendered a depressed and miserable shell of a bird through such circumstances. I guess they've never known anything different. Life simply is violence to them, and they're used to it. In creating a largely peaceful, civil society, I reckon we have pampered ourselves to the point of being unable to handle reality.
