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How do human beings come to accept dead children as collateral damage? How does an insurance company deny medical care to a sick child without moral crisis?
In this episode, Michael C. Patterson draws on historian Timothy Snyder's powerful distinction between two German words for body: Leib and Körper. Leib is the living, breathing, irreplaceable human being. Körper is that same person reduced to an object, a statistic, a cost, a corpse. This episode explores how Körper logic became embedded in the systems that shape everyday life.
From the invention of the arrow to the drone operator's console to the shareholder return calculation, the mechanism is the same: distance, abstraction, and the gradual erosion of our felt sense of other people's inherent worth. Our first act of resistance may be not political but perceptual. We must learn to recognize when we are objectifying people and choose, deliberately, to shift from a Körper to a Leib mindset.
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As mentioned in the podcast, you might be interested in two earlier podcasts that discussed how our mind struggles to balance two different ways of processing reality.
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