"It is easy to kill when you don't see your victim"
About this Quote
Distance is the oldest accomplice to violence. Durrenmatt’s line lands with the cold efficiency of a moral syllogism: remove the face, and you remove the friction. It’s not a sentimental claim about empathy; it’s an accusation about systems that are designed to keep blood off your hands. “Easy” is the knife twist here. He’s not describing a rare pathology, he’s describing a default setting - what happens when killing becomes procedural, abstracted into roles, orders, statistics.
Durrenmatt, a Swiss dramatist steeped in postwar Europe’s ethical wreckage, had a recurring obsession: responsibility dissolves in labyrinths. In his world, guilt isn’t denied so much as redistributed until no one feels it. “Don’t see your victim” isn’t only about literal visibility (the sniper’s scope, the bomber’s altitude). It’s about bureaucratic invisibility: the committee, the courtroom, the “just following policy” alibi. Modernity specializes in creating buffers between cause and consequence, and then calling those buffers professionalism.
The subtext is even harsher: if sight makes killing harder, then institutions that want killing to be easy will engineer blindness. That can mean propaganda that turns people into categories, technology that converts bodies into targets, or language that turns death into “collateral damage.” Durrenmatt’s cynicism isn’t performative; it’s diagnostic. He’s warning that the real danger isn’t monstrous individuals. It’s ordinary people granted comfortable distance - and the permission to stop looking.
Durrenmatt, a Swiss dramatist steeped in postwar Europe’s ethical wreckage, had a recurring obsession: responsibility dissolves in labyrinths. In his world, guilt isn’t denied so much as redistributed until no one feels it. “Don’t see your victim” isn’t only about literal visibility (the sniper’s scope, the bomber’s altitude). It’s about bureaucratic invisibility: the committee, the courtroom, the “just following policy” alibi. Modernity specializes in creating buffers between cause and consequence, and then calling those buffers professionalism.
The subtext is even harsher: if sight makes killing harder, then institutions that want killing to be easy will engineer blindness. That can mean propaganda that turns people into categories, technology that converts bodies into targets, or language that turns death into “collateral damage.” Durrenmatt’s cynicism isn’t performative; it’s diagnostic. He’s warning that the real danger isn’t monstrous individuals. It’s ordinary people granted comfortable distance - and the permission to stop looking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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