The Erosion of Conscience

De Bacterium Volume I - How the Hunger's Cruelty Altered the Temperament of Man Set Down in the Year of Our Lord, 1815, by One Who Watches, Nameless In the months following the first great outbreaks, observers began to remark upon a curious alteration in the temper of men. One might have expected that the spectacle of such cruelty - the Hunger tearing open the living, the streets made slick with blood, the dead left half-consumed where they fell - would have driven the populace toward greater restraint. Yet the opposite seemed often to occur. Familiarity with slaughter did not sharpen the conscience. It dulled it. Those who dwelt long in afflicted districts grew accustomed to sights that would once have unmanned the stoutest soldier. Viscera ceased to shock. The opened body, once an object of horror, became merely another feature of the day’s ruin. A man who had watched the Hunger feed without number found that the threshold of his own disgust had been quietly eroded. From this slow erosion arose behaviours that earlier generations would scarcely have believed possible amongst the living. Acts of violence grew theatrical in their severity. Prisoners were not merely killed but flayed. Bodies were opened in grotesque imitation of the Hunger’s work. In several recorded instances, cannibalism appeared not as starvation’s desperate last recourse but as something darker: a deliberate trespass across the boundary that once separated man from the thing that devoured him. No satisfactory explanation was ever agreed upon, though several physicians offered conjecture. The most persuasive held that when brutality becomes the ordinary condition of life, the scale by which men judge violence must necessarily shift. What once sufficed to terrify or to dominate another man ceased to carry its former force. If a killing was to shock, it must now be done with excess. If terror was to be instilled, it required spectacle. Thus the cruelty of the Hunger did not remain confined to the creatures themselves. It seeped outward, corrupting the conduct of the living, until in certain places the distinction between predator and victim grew disturbingly thin.