I’m sure most of you have heard about the game called “The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. For those of you unaware of it, I’ll briefly explain.
The game is that you have to take a person and find a path back to Kevin Bacon. The challenge is to do it in less than six hops.
For example, if you started with Jennifer Lawrence, you can get to Kevin Bacon by saying that Jennifer Lawrence was in “The Burning Plain” with Charlize Theron, who was in “Trapped” with Kevin Bacon. That’s two hops. The more hops it takes to get to Kevin Bacon, the more obscure the references tend to be.
I have a theory similar to TSDoKB I call “The Six Degrees of Me”.
I’m going to pause a bit and say I’m not talking about me “me”. I’m talking about the “Royal me” (if that’s a thing). The “me” I mentioned doesn’t have to actually be me, it can be any “me”, which could be you. Go ahead, read that again, it will make sense.
The point is, there is nothing magical about how I perceive things, the “six degrees of me” applies to everyone.
The more hops it takes to trace a route from me to another person, the less I care about that person.
For example, you can trace a route to me from any of my friends with a single hop. So, I tend to care what happens to them a great deal. But, my friend’s friend? Not so much.
If I hear that something bad happened to a friend of my friend, I may feel bad for my friend, but I won’t give his friend a second thought. Because I don’t care.
After only two hops I go from caring a lot to not caring at all. By the time I consider the friend of the friend of my friend, I have no more fucks left to give.
So, imagine how little I care beyond three hops. Exactly.
If I hear that someone died or was killed that was more than two hops away, they’re not going to get any “thoughts and prayers” from me because I’m not going to even think about them once the conversation is over.
To summarize, the less you know someone, the less you care about that someone’s wellbeing. You might say you’re “devastated” by a stranger’s death. But deep down, you don’t really care about someone you don’t know. However, you do care a great deal about the people closest to you. With the possible exception of four or five people on the entire planet, this rule applies to everyone.
I’m certain that the deaths of the people killed in Atlanta or Boulder this past week is tragic. It is for someone. But not for me. I’m sure it’s tragic and sad for their families and friends but their deaths don’t any effect on me. Because I didn’t know them. Clearly someone will grieve for them. Just not me.
Since the people in Atlanta and Boulder are many hops from me, those unfortunate events shouldn’t impact me at all. But they probably will.
The fact is that a couple of nut jobs (insanity isn’t bound by race or religion) killed a bunch of people.
And, because they did it using guns, the immediate cry is for more gun control.
And, increased gun control reduces the ability for someone I do care about to protect themselves from an aforementioned crazy person.
And, if they’re unable to protect themselves, there is a higher likelihood that they will get injured and/or killed by some other nut job with a knife, bomb, gun or bludgeon.
In three hops we went from someone getting killed by an insane person to an increased chance that someone dear to me will be killed because they have been rendered defenseless.
And that I do care about.
