Hello, Taraz. The story about your father is incredibly heart-wrenching. I cannot even begin to imagine the trauma of a seven-year-old boy witnessing the brutal murder of his best friend’s family. It makes perfect sense that he chose the path of pacifism for the rest of his life; he saw the very depths of the abyss of human cruelty.

What I read is something deeply disturbing about our modern age: the transformation of violence from a tool of pure terror into a form of perverse entertainment. When public executions or violence are broadcast, it ceases to be about ‘justice’ or ‘deterrence’ and simply becomes a spectacle; indeed, it feeds a very dark part of the human psyche.

You briefly mentioned Venezuela in your post, and as someone who was born and brought up in Caracas, I can tell you first-hand that when a society and its institutions begin to devalue human life, the rot spreads everywhere. Normalising violence brings neither peace nor closure; it merely breeds a colder, more desensitised population (‘slave zombies’, as I call them…).

To answer your final question: *if we are not repulsed by intentional murder, that suggests we have lost our empathy and, by extension, our humanity. When a society turns the act of taking a life into a televised event, it is not demonstrating strength; it is demonstrating profound moral decay. And this is not a modern phenomenon; there are many years of history behind it.