Warning: This thread is intended to make you feel better about humanity, but it could have a different effect: It could make you feel scared. So if you’re someone who obsesses about danger, maybe don’t read this thread.

I also want to acknowledge there are so many people who have been physically hurt by other people. It’s not my intention to minimize that, particularly because I’ve had only a few experiences being physically attacked.

I’m talking about specific obsessive fears in the culture.

Airports have a lot of “security.” Lots of buildings have “security.” Your door has a “lock” on it.

Here’s the truth: If someone wants to hurt you enough, they’ll figure out how to do it. Absent a bodyguard (hell, even with a bodyguard), you’re dead.

This is good news!

Think about it: Even with every terrifyingly tragic mass-shooting event in recent history, the fact that almost all of the 7.5 billion people in the world aren’t planning ways to hurt others is a really positive sign for humanity.

Either that or the violent ones are super dumb.

You’d have to be stupid if you couldn’t figure out how to commit a really upsetting atrocity, particularly with all the tools available (especially in America AKA the Ocean of Guns between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean).

Looks like people just don’t want to hurt us!

The perpetrators of mass atrocities sometimes get called “masterminds” and it’s just dumb. Pretty much every sick violent thing that people have done outside of war has been really damned simple.

It doesn’t take a mastermind. It takes a particulary kind of sociopath. A rare one.

Anyway, I’ll keep locking my door and having means to defend myself and my family (not comfortable with guns…), but I’m not going to kid myself that I’m defending against capable people who want to hurt us.

At best, I’m defending against idiots who might randomly crash into us.

I’m not saying there aren’t really dangerous people out there. But the fact that it would be SO EASY for anyone to do something terrible, yet hundreds and hundreds of millions of them aren’t doing it, is more hopeful than if they weren’t doing it because of some security theatre.

There seems to be an extremely small number of people who mean us harm. The more we take care of each other, the fewer there will be.

People are basically good. Even our fear of them is evidence of goodness (we mean to protect one another from harm).

This is a hopeful thing.