re: #223 The Ghost of a Flea

People can’t accept it’s going to be their next door neighbor or the guy that shares their church pew that’s most likely to harm them. That suggests that exterior qualities used to assess “goodness”—which generally involve “similar to me” assessments—are useless.

Crime being done by an “other” solves the problem by redefining the problem.

The overwhelming emphasis on “stranger danger” is an ingrained evolutionary cognitive bias in human perception that has become less and less applicable to modern first world living, where the saying “familiarity breeds contempt” seems far more apropos.