Why are our first impressions of events so important to us...? It is because we feel our identities are at stake... Every culture concerns itself with news-bringing in one form or another; most other cultures have been more relaxed about it. Perhaps simply because we have the power to communicate news quickly and widely, we are on edge about it, afraid that the world will change behind our backs if we are not [up-to-date] with a thousand dissociated facts that do not concern us directly. It is a measure of our metaphysical insecurity, which is the constant driver in the modern urge for mastery...”

​“...bureaucracy is an apparatus set up to entitle us to make confident predictions in every field of social policy, because confident predictions are what we have decided we need in order to justify our actions.”

We often mine the latest “tweets” from our preferred news outlet for the most up-to-date vindication of our actions and opinions.  But because we mistake current opinion as virtual "hard data" on where the future is heading, our moral judgements are up for review every time we click the "refresh" button.  Our anticipations and predictions are made obsolete with each frenzied turn of the news cycle, and so we are never entirely sure our actions are sufficiently justified: the resulting anxiety typically bears the marks of moral paralysis,  or alternatively, impatience with the very exercise of moral discourse itself. ​ Our harried anticipation of where public opinion is headed next leaves us far too anxious to commit to any one clear course of moral action.

​​ ...we might be tempted to conclude that our work would be effective in proportion to the durability of its products. Making the terracotta army would be better than making gingerbread men for the children's party, planting a tree better than cleaning a room, manufacturing the plastic bags that hang around forever caught in the branches of trees better than making biodegradable ones.

"A sense of duty imprisons you" says NY artist Jenny Holzer.
That is certainly what many of us most fear.
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