The Long Debrief

Who counts as someone whose suffering matters? That question — deceptively simple — sits at the center of one of the most important concepts in social psychology: moral exclusion. In this episode, Adrian unpacks the theoretical architecture behind moral exclusion, from Susan Opotow's foundational framework to Bandura's mechanisms of moral disengagement, and applies it to the current political mome...

“That Feeling Was Real”   I was twelve years old, standing in a tent full of folding chairs and summer heat, and the man at the front said: that’s the Holy Spirit. That’s God, present in this place, moving in your heart. Don’t you dare walk away from it.   I didn’t walk away from it. Not for a long time.   Years later — adult, post-war, somewhere in the middle of trying to figure out who I was out...

He walked into the office and pulled out a knife. Not to use it. To show it. He held it up, smiling, and explained — calmly, like he was asking a favor — that it was for another inmate. The psychologist on the other side of the desk was twenty-something, brand-new, master’s degree still warm. The emergency button was within reach. He didn’t push it. That small decision — to not report the knife —...

The radio crackled back to life.   “5272, you’re clear. Back in service.”   I was standing in a field. My hands were still shaking. There was a little girl behind me being checked out by paramedics — she was fine, physically fine — and her father was in the back of a cruiser. And the institution was telling me I was back in service.   Like nothing had happened.   That moment — not the standoff, no...

She had hands that knew how to work. I can still see them — sorting through donated clothes. This goes. This doesn’t. These children are small. These will fit a grown man. I called her Grandma. She spoke Pennsylvania Dutch, baked in from a lifetime in a Beachy-Amish community in rural Iowa. When she wanted us to help her pack the barrels, she’d say — come schtuff the barrels. My brothers and I wou...