ABOUT a month ago, a military training aircraft crashed onto Milestone School in Dhaka, killing 30 people, including many children, in a fiery explosion. When I saw the news, I fell into silence. But strangely, I noticed something: I didn’t feel the same deep shock I once would have. A few years ago, such a tragedy would have devastated me — I’d have spent the day in mourning, maybe written something in grief or anger. But this time, I didn’t cry. My throat didn’t tighten. It was as if even a child’s burning death had lost its ability to wound.
Something in me has collapsed. I thought it might be exhaustion. But then I realised, it’s not just personal fatigue. It’s the exhaustion of our time. After months of witnessing the unfolding and escalating genocide in Gaza — children dying from bombs and starvation, mothers screaming under rubble, bloodied faces on every screen — I’ve become numb. A year ago, in July, as student-led protests erupted across the country, Sheikh Hasina unleashed a brutal crackdown in a desperate attempt to hold on to power. That massacre still lingers in our collective memory like an open wound. Before this, we had endured the harrowing scenes and desperate cries of those who perished in the Tazreen factory fire and the collapse ofÌýRana Plaza.
Psychologists call this condition compassion fatigue. When we are exposed to constant suffering and violence, our inner mechanism for empathy begins to break down. At first, it’s a kind of defence. But when it spreads across a society — when we collectively stop feeling — then it becomes a threat to the very idea of being human. This isn’t just an individual problem anymore. It has become a societal reality. During Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, this desensitisation has reached horrifying levels. Thousands of children are dead. Electricity, water, and medicine have been cut off. Food is being deliberately blocked. And yet, a large segment of Israeli society not only feels no sorrow — they mock the suffering. Talk shows joke about starving children. Memes are shared gleefully. Politicians openly declare, ‘There are no innocent people in Gaza.’
To make sense of this moral collapse, we can explore Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. Arendt, one of the most significant political thinkers of the 20th century, coined the phrase while covering the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. She observed that Eichmann was not a monster, not even a fanatic. He was a bureaucrat — an ordinary man following orders, executing genocidal tasks without reflection or emotion. Arendt pointed to thoughtlessness as the true root of evil: the failure to think, to judge, and to question. When humans stop reflecting ethically and simply become obedient cogs in a system, atrocity becomes normalised. Evil is no longer dramatic; it becomes routine.
In Gaza, we see the machinery of death functioning with clinical efficiency — bombs dropped on homes, food withheld, aid blocked. And the society around it? Applauding. Justifying. Celebrating. The genocide is not an accident — it’s a socially sanctioned act of ‘defence’. Not only is the state of Israel complicit, but large portions of its people and many other stakeholders are co-authors of this horror. Behind this machinery lies a web of global interest. The war on Gaza is not just about ‘security’—it’s also about profit. The United States, the world’s largest arms exporter, gives billions in military aid to Israel each year. But this aid mostly cycles back into the profits of US weapons manufacturers. Every bomb dropped, every drone strike, and every smart missile launched on Gaza means record-breaking profit for the arms industry.
To sustain this industry, war is necessary. And to sustain war, the public must believe in its morality. That’s why the media, the politicians, and even comedians work together to produce a language where the death of children is ‘regrettable but justified’. This is the banality of evil in its most perfected form: sanitised, profitable, and socially accepted. Politics and profit merge seamlessly, and in that merger, violence becomes ‘defence’. And those of us who scroll past this with silent eyes, who feel nothing — we too become silent components of this machinery.
We are entering an age of collective thoughtlessness, where reflection is obsolete. Social media, mainstream news, and government propaganda — they converge to generate a passive moral consensus: that violence is normal and that empathy is optional. And so I ask: if we no longer feel, if we no longer think — what remains of the human in us?
This question becomes even more urgent in the age of artificial intelligence. AI is still in its childhood, compared to the long history of humankind. It has no native ethics, no built-in empathy. It learns — from us. From our words, our data, and our behaviour. Its moral architecture is being constructed by watching us. But what are we teaching it? If we teach it that starving children is a strategy, if we teach it that mockery is normal, if we teach it that genocide can be logical, then what kind of entity are we raising?
AI is not moral. It is a pattern recognition engine. And the pattern we are giving it is compassionless, cynical, and violent. Today’s silence, today’s desensitisation, today’s apathy — this is the textbook we are handing over to the future. And one day, when AI begins to make autonomous decisions, it may look at our data and say, ‘These deaths were normal. These choices were rational.’ And when that day comes, we may no longer have the power to change the code.
This brings me back to my own numbness. Whether in Gaza or in Dhaka, when death no longer stirs something in me, I realise I am also part of this future. The fact that I still feel anxiety over my own insensitivity may be the last remnant of my humanity. And this text is nothing more than that — a tremor of worry. A whispered resistance to the seduction of numbness. This is not a solution. It is simply an utterance — an attempt to preserve the difference between being human and becoming a machine.
Perhaps one day, AI will teach us what it means to be human. But before that, we must ask: does it still mean anything at all?
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Baki Billah is a political activist.