We agreed: it seems improbable that after years, decades, of politics, action, research, we can still be so easily shocked. You know it’s not uncommon to hear activists, while discussing quotidian barbarities - the system’s incredible & everyday sadisms - confessing, almost sheepish, ‘I was actually shocked.’ Embarrassed at the naivety that we’re still stunned to hear of someone, say, demanding victims pay their brutalisers for the rampage ; or enriching themselves with their official powers to cage children; or braying with laughter at the prospect of ruining the lives of the elderly for profit; or enthusiastically invoking fascist tropes to attack minorities; or bringing picnics to spectate at mass murder; or, or, or, & on. In fact, we admitted to each other, things seem to get more, not less, shocking. Which can only mean, you said, that things are actually getting worse.

Perhaps. But you know there’s a machismo in misery. & there is another possibility.

Not to say both can’t be true, that things can’t, don’t, degenerate. But ongoing amazement isn’t necessarily a failure of rigour. Learning the world to change it changes us, too; maybe softens the keratin, dead psychic skin we rationalise as ‘realism’.

Perhaps this is how a person can be more & more surprised how bad the world is the more & more she understands how bad the world is.