Michael Thomsen
05-11-2017
The normalization of suffering is a consequence of all systematization, implicit in all data collection. It has the air of a natural law, like entropy, which West describes as guaranteeing that every attempt to produce order and structure also produces disorder, and that progress in any given area must produce regression in another. It frontloads any system-wide view of life with a haunted anxiety about that system being unviable, something that will become self-evident when angry mobs start to form or corpses begin piling up where they weren’t expected. At some point, the two orders of magnitude — the individual and the urban — must collide.