In a recent article, Caitlin Johnstone condemns and bemoans Western popular disregard for the mass murders carried out in their names by the governments they elect.
Most readers of this journal would agree with her assertion that the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the US et al. in the last half century or so certainly constitute one of the world’s most pressing (and pronounced) problems.
Johnstone argues that these brazen crimes are much more important and urgent than the domestic policy issues (health, education, housing, and so on) that most ordinary citizens are preoccupied with.
Yet, perversely, despite the glaring categorical disparities, the misplaced popular emphases persist.
And this means that the murder and mayhem committed in foreign lands largely by US-led cabals continue to increase in frequency and magnitude, and largely without widespread popular dissent or accountability for the perpetrators.
She likens the denial, and (implicit) licensing, of such acts by citizens of their governments to a wife who seems not to care that her husband, when he is not performing house duties or at work, moonlights as a peripatetic serial killer.
We can add some important embellishments to the analogy, which I am sure Caitlin would agree with.
First, by supposing that said wife doesn’t seem to mind either that her husband is a paid-up member of a serial killer (Mafia-like) club, which rewards him in different ways for the murders that he commits on behalf of the club’s President and the ones that he helps the President and other club members to commit.
And second, that the husband is likely to have rationalized his barbarism by saying that the class of people whose representatives he was murdering would be uplifted by the news he had to bring about what they should value, and how they should live their lives and manage their affairs. That is, while his acts seemed barbaric on the surface, in reality, they were developmental and altruistic. These bitter pills were for their own good.
Johnstone says that people in general behave like the wife in her analogy, not just because they are preoccupied with domestic issues, but also because victims who do not resemble them (ethnically, religiously, etc.) do not count for very much or are ‘unworthy’. We might add, except perhaps as a curiosity or a macabre form of occasional titillation.
Knowing that her husband’s murderous predilections are directed exclusively at brown and black people, Muslims, and so on, there is no reason for her to be outraged or alarmed.
The direct correlation between empathy and ethnic/religious similarity takes care of that.
However, while Caitlin’s ‘forgiving, turn-a-blind-eye wife’ analogy is dramatically engaging, it glosses over or omits some important pieces of the explanation, one or two of which are mentioned above. But there are others:
For most people… their deep sense of life’s injustices and of impending global doom is suppressed because they are too busy trying to survive. When your every waking moment must be devoted to finding food and shelter for your loved ones and protecting them against harm, the idea of fighting for the distant, fantastical luxury of a better world is something that you simply cannot afford. You avert your gaze and step around the moribund body on the pavement and hurry on because you have become (been conditioned to be) inured to the misery of others, because you are resigned to the fact that the suffering of ‘losers’ is a natural by-product of a system that (you are repeatedly told) has no viable alternatives, and because you dread that you could be next.
Since the advent of capitalism’s most pernicious form, neoliberalism, in the early 1980s, this balancing act – of keeping the oppressed majority so preoccupied with survival, so cowed by the fear of losing their jobs or falling ill, so distracted by popular culture and identity politics, communication gadgets and ‘platforms’, and so misinformed and befuddled by the mainstream media that they do not have the knowledge, the energy, or the will to revolt and express their rage – has been skilfully maintained by the Machiavellian ‘masters of the universe’. (Blunt, 2026, p. 68).
To return to the politics of domesticity in Caitilin’s analogy, the wife ignores her husband’s murderous habits not just because the victims are unworthy but also because their deaths do not impinge directly on her own desperate, distracted, and heavily conditioned state. If she is poor, she is overwhelmed with the day-to-day business of feeding her children, keeping a roof over their heads, and staying alive.
It is not because she elects to concern herself exclusively with domestic issues, but more because she has been put in a position where she has no choice but to.
She also knows that her husband is not an isolated case and that this type of behavior is widely condoned by her neighbors for the reasons given above.
Though accomplished by somewhat different means, this carefully cultivated and imposed docility and unconcern among the poor and dispossessed are just as pronounced in the middle and upper-middle levels of the social and economic hierarchy of capitalist societies:
Part of the wicked genius of the capitalist system… is that those – the vast majority – who are most disadvantaged by it and could pose the greatest threat are either paralysed by their hopelessness and dispossession or so atomised and socially isolated as to be incapable of united action. ‘Sacks of potatoes’ whose social bonds have been broken beyond repair and whose relationships with others have been manufactured instead to be self-centred and self-aggrandising, exploitative, and manipulative – ‘what’s in it for me?’ – rather than cooperative, empathetic, and humane… The deliberate creation of such isolation, callousness, hopelessness, and despair is integral to capitalist control and subjugation.
More privileged and ‘refined’ members of society are no less socially dislocated and indoctrinated: by educational institutions, “the engine rooms of neoliberal indoctrination and elite formation” (Blunt, 2023, p. xi) that inculcate conformity and convictions about the absence of alternatives to the ruling paradigm; by a corrupt political system comprising government and corporate elites who do the same; and by the corporate-controlled mass media. They are thereby converted into capitalism’s most effective and sinister proselytisers, rhetorical automatons, and missionaries (Blunt, 2026, p. 69, ibid).
The general argument applies equally of course to our seeming obliviousness to the other great threats to life on Earth: impending climate catastrophe; the increasing likelihood of nuclear Armageddon; creeping fascism; pandemics; rogue artificial intelligence; the (even by their abysmal standards) wild and delusional antics of the current occupants of the White House who seem intent on driving us over the precipice in at least some of these respects; and the squirmingly embarrassing subservience of the (mainly) Western governments that support them.
The (fuller) explanation provided here for the persistence of popular disregard for global existential threats makes clear that neither housewives nor citizens are suddenly going to be able to snap out of it, to see things as they really are and bring their husbands and governments into line.
If anything, as capitalism gradually implodes or ‘suicides’ (Hedges, 2026), its architects and beneficiaries will tighten their grip on the public psyche (think what a boon to that enterprise AI will be – see, for example, Hao, 2026), making éclaircissement for the wives of serial killers and popular uprisings against genocidal governments more difficult and less likely.