"A shocking occurrence ceases to be shocking when it occurs daily"
About this Quote
Shock has a half-life. Chase’s line is blunt because it’s describing a quiet psychological bargain: the mind can’t stay on high alert forever, so it starts converting outrage into routine. “Shocking occurrence” is deliberately vague, a placeholder that could be war footage, street violence, corruption, or cruelty dressed up as policy. The point isn’t the event; it’s the repetition. Daily frequency doesn’t just normalize the act, it normalizes the observer’s numbness.
The sentence works by turning a moral expectation into a mechanical process. We like to imagine shock as proof of conscience, a reflex that protects our sense of right and wrong. Chase suggests it’s also a limited resource. When “daily” becomes the tempo, shock stops functioning as alarm and starts functioning as background noise. That’s the subtext: habituation isn’t neutral. It’s how societies learn to live alongside the intolerable without technically endorsing it. You don’t have to agree with injustice to become compatible with it; you just have to see it often enough.
As an author writing in a 20th-century landscape shaped by mass media, industrialized warfare, and the steady churn of headlines, Chase is diagnosing a modern condition: the conveyor belt of catastrophe. The intent reads less like despair than warning. If the shocking can be made ordinary through repetition, then repetition becomes a tool - for propagandists, for sensationalist media, for any system that benefits when people stop flinching.
The sentence works by turning a moral expectation into a mechanical process. We like to imagine shock as proof of conscience, a reflex that protects our sense of right and wrong. Chase suggests it’s also a limited resource. When “daily” becomes the tempo, shock stops functioning as alarm and starts functioning as background noise. That’s the subtext: habituation isn’t neutral. It’s how societies learn to live alongside the intolerable without technically endorsing it. You don’t have to agree with injustice to become compatible with it; you just have to see it often enough.
As an author writing in a 20th-century landscape shaped by mass media, industrialized warfare, and the steady churn of headlines, Chase is diagnosing a modern condition: the conveyor belt of catastrophe. The intent reads less like despair than warning. If the shocking can be made ordinary through repetition, then repetition becomes a tool - for propagandists, for sensationalist media, for any system that benefits when people stop flinching.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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