They just stepped over the body...
A brief meditation on an illuminating truth.
Imagine your peers, your friends, continuing with their PowerPoint presentation while you die alone on the pavement. Perhaps this is the only pity we can have for the corporate executive. Maybe it's even incumbent on us to offer this pity. But empathy must not permit lies. Actions have consequences, as the trope goes.
The corporate executive's lonely death and his friends' ambivalence only demonstrate the already apparent: the system is transactional to an absurd degree. Nobody really believes in anything. There are few people willing to take tyranny on faith. Even the people who buy in, on some level, know they're being lied to, or are simply unequipped to rationally contend with the real world.
The latter group only presents a political complication, for the psychologically dispossessed do not represent political agents; they represent humanity pushed to some extreme. These are the most deserving of compassion. To put it plainly, to varying degrees, those who struggle to identify reality struggle with a pathology.
The first group, however, can be negotiated with to differing degrees with various methods. For instance, there are the purely transactional: people so absorbed in accumulation they barely acknowledge their own humanity. Their friends step over their convulsing body for a convulsing body is no longer a useful body.
But we shouldn't see all who buy in through the same lens. Not all those who become complicit in the atrocities of a system are voluntary nihilists. We owe these people this grace: they believe out of fear. It is on us to break through that fear. Not to assuage it, but rather to force the confrontation that turns terror into mere fear. It is only by breaking through the fears of our peers and loved ones and friends that we can mainstream the revolution.
The world that we imagine is so dependent on compassion. The world we want to create is, indeed, built on that foundation. But to have compassion does not mean we acquiesce, it does not mean that we sacrifice our right to dignity—for these would be morally indefensible positions.
We have a moment and we must seize it. But this is not a moment of sudden breakthrough, this is a moment in which we can select from our possible futures. We must show those to whom we have obligations that they are worthy of dignity and that a world built upon that principle is possible. And we must show them the visceral truth: dignity is impossible in the current paradigm, for this paradigm demands that you step over the bodies of your friends so that you can get to work on time.