You know why murder is bad? Because it keeps a person from living their own life. So yes, fucking with billions of people for x years, at best just influencing

You know why murder is bad? Because it keeps a person from living their own life. So yes, fucking with billions of people for x years, at best just influencing them a bit, at worst exploiting them rather extremely, soaking up 90% of their time so some psychopath can buy an additional golf course, absolutely does amount to a whole lot of murder. Remember early capitalism? Children in mines? So when someone gets exploited and then dies of diseases, or lives as a sick poor person for decades, is that not a sibling of murder? There is something as the walking dead, there really is. As Nietzsche said, the last man lives the longest... but the question probably is, do they actually live. People seem to become more timid and more neurotic, instead of more alive, more defenseless rather than more skillful, they suffer "information overload" rather than being more informed. That's just anecdotal, but I'm amazed at just how many weak and stuck up people I meet each day, and how young so many of them are. Between their parents being fools or having no time for them, and them being sprayed with the mental equivalent of fast food everywhere else, sometimes even reaching into the education systems -- all that does have an effect. You might say we're being gaslighted on a global scale.. and mixed, dishonest signals hurt even the strongest people, others they can drive positively insane. And they are only emitted by the unhinged, too. Only broken people, or people in broken moments (same difference really, even though I speak of "types of people" I ultimately do mean types of behaviors and habits etc., I think everybody can theoretically change but it's easier and more satisfying to be self-righteous) want power for the sake of power, all rationalizations and neat excuses be damned, that's what is at the core of it and it matters, and they are slowly molding us in the image of the screaming, empty abyss that is their personality. Would you rather live for 2 weeks as you, or for 50 years with very strong dementia? If you set aside how strongly I feel about this, that I have chips on my shoulder and pet peeves; do you at least see my point in principle? For totalitarian systems, murder is not an end in itself. Making people, their individual agency, their unpredictable "spark", totally obsolete, by murder or other means, THAT is at the heart of it. And in that sense, we live in a world that is becoming so totalitarian it might not even afford us the honesty of murdering us.