The Inheritance of Numbness
How centuries of systemic violence shaped a world where empathy feels rare and disconnection feels normal.
Before the United States existed, European powers—particularly Britain—were exporting undesirable populations to the colonies. These included prisoners, the poor, orphans, and unprotected women.
Many were trafficked under the guise of indentured servitude. Women were often promised safety or marriage, but in reality, they were used for sexual labor, domestic service, and reproduction.
This laid the foundation for a society that treated human life—especially women and children—as transactional.
As African chattel slavery became institutionalized, the logic evolved.
Black women were exploited not just as laborers, but as reproductive property.
Rape was systemic. Children born from it were legally enslaved. The body became a mechanism for generational profit.
This system normalized forced breeding and detached reproduction from love, consent, or even relationship. Family bonds were severed by design. Compassion wasn’t removed—it was structurally irrelevant.
Indigenous women were treated similarly.
Colonizers kidnapped, raped, and traded Native women as spoils of conquest.
This too was not incidental—it was used as a method of domination and control.
The violent severance of family and community bonds was strategic.
When formal slavery ended, the economic and social logic that treated people as disposable continued.
Sharecropping, convict leasing, forced adoptions, Indian boarding schools, and the rise of state custody systems all functioned to disrupt families and extract value from the most vulnerable.
Poor and racialized children were routinely removed from their homes. Women were criminalized or institutionalized for failing to meet standards set by systems designed to fail them. Men were imprisoned, surveilled, and rendered emotionally unavailable by both trauma and economic instability.
The foster care system emerged as a continuation of this logic—disproportionately removing children from marginalized families, often placing them in unstable or exploitative environments.
Today, foster children are among the most trafficked populations in the United States.
Incarcerated women—many of them survivors of abuse—are often punished for trauma-induced behavior, while their children are absorbed by systems that commodify “care”.
In parallel, broader society reinforced these dynamics culturally.
Mass media sexualized women while detaching sex from relational depth.
Economic systems rewarded productivity, not emotional intelligence.
Religion promoted obedience over introspection.
Schools enforced discipline over self-awareness.
Generation after generation, families were built not on connection, but on survival.
Children raised in these environments learned to suppress feeling, distrust intimacy, and normalize harm.
Across the last century, this became self-replicating.
People raised without empathy often raise children without empathy—not out of malice, but because they were never shown another way. The homes became reflections of the systems. Silence replaced truth. Control replaced care. Emotional neglect became standard practice.
What we now call “the human condition” is the outcome of this lineage.
Widespread detachment, numbing, and interpersonal violence are not random—they are consequences.
People did not arrive here empty.
They were shaped by institutions, homes, and histories designed to eliminate vulnerability, disrupt compassion, and normalize exploitation.
To look around today and ask, “What happened to humanity?” is to miss the more urgent question:
What has humanity been subjected to—over time, and without interruption?
The answer explains everything.