On Systems and Blame

David Foster Wallace delivered the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, an enlightening meditation on empathy which involves, in part, supermarket check-out lanes. The content deals mostly with the problem and importance of empathy. I strongly recommend that you listen to it.

A supermarket checkout lane encounter today reminded me of that speech and of a principle summed up nicely by a Pynchon nugget from Gravity’s Rainbow (1973):

Proverbs for Paranoids 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.