The Exorbitant Cost Of Numbness

By Hamza

Bio: The author is a student at LUMS from Quetta, Baluchistan, majoring in political science.

Cobwebs clung to the corners. Old things lay strewn across the floor. Musty air permeated the room, heavy with a dense smell. And there lay Muntaha, old enough to shoulder a schoolbag, yet young enough to trust that the world outside would not betray her. A seven-year-old child assaulted, raped, and murdered.

Was it an aberration, a crime so atrocious that it crossed the bounds of abomination—liable to be dismissed as the work of a depraved mind? Facts offer an utterly different story. Eighteen-month-old Aizal recently met the same fate. Mir Raza, a young IBA graduate and a thriving businessman with a promising life stretching before him, was robbed of his life; his post-mortem examination revealed traces of acid and marks of torture that his body bore.

Different names. Different stories. Yet testifying to the same grim pattern that recurs persistently. And perhaps more distressing is our habituation to it: another story breaks, headlines saturate social media feeds, condolences arrive, vacuous promises follow, and eventually, the outrage subsides.

Until it happens again.

With each gruelling episode, our emotional responses are sapped. That which once transfixed us with horror now hardly unsettles us. The gravity does not diminish; we resign ourselves to the dismal reality. What’s even more disturbing is the gradual erosion of our capacity to acutely realise the weight of these atrocities.

This phenomenon ought not to be labelled as apathy. Apathy is much simpler: it is the vacancy of feeling. What we are experiencing is something far more pernicious: a gradual distortion of our senses, recalibrating what we consider shocking. We are undergoing an unconscious normalisation and readjustment to realities that are far from normal. Accustomed to darkness, we watch the very conception of light wither away.

We do not cease to care. We require more to feel the same empathy and gravitas that were once instantly evoked.

The implications of this shifting baseline are dire. Now for a story to break through, it requires something more heart-rending. It must involve fire, a child, acid, or a lynching to pierce through the noise—although briefly. We have not become cruel; our threshold has changed, filtering out and grading horrors on a curve. And the worst part? We scarcely realise the higher standard that we establish. There is a peculiar cruelty that this readjustment entails. No one consents to feel less over a murdered child, an acid attack, or a sexual assault. It unfolds and creeps in us in increments: one story, one headline, one brutality, one brief sigh. Until the sum of it all is a society that can read about Aizal, Muntaha, and Mir Raza in a single sitting, with its emotional faculties completely exhausted. The prevailing emotion changes from fury to fatigue.

What we are surrendering, with each successive case, is not compassion; it is accountability. Accountability when it matters the most, until the headlines fade away from our feeds, the case is buried in the docket, and the victim is swallowed by history—before another name appears to draw another sigh of grief. A society that, though unconsciously, decides to exist beside crimes instead of demanding a reckoning for the culpable is perpetually doomed to remain rife with them because the ability to feel, to question, and to compel accountability has been effectively degraded.

The outcome of it all is not that we will turn a blind eye to the horrors; we will grieve—briefly, outrageously, sincerely, and uselessly. Our grief will remain precisely in the same fashion but will fail to prevent such abhorrent acts because the mechanism that might have translated outrage into tangible outcome has been rendered inoperative through the desensitising monotony of repetition.

The result? A society that has stopped reacting meaningfully. Brief outcry coupled with a hollow response results in a late, defanged, or no outcome at all. The perpetrators, who may have been deterred by the consequences, now have less to dread. Thus, further crime is bred, and its miscreants emboldened.

Desensitization is a distinct peril from the crimes that breed it in the first place. It consistently curtails the cost of crime for everyone still capable of inflicting it. When the very alarm that stirs our conscience has been paralysed, a subtle message is whispered that another child, another toddler, or another youth awaits the same fate as Muntaha, Aizal, or Mir Raza.