#7 Seeing Our Humanity Despite Systems That Deny It

How do human beings come to accept dead children as collateral damage? How does an insurance company deny medical care to a sick child without moral crisis?

In this episode, Michael C. Patterson draws on historian Timothy Snyder's powerful distinction between two German words for body: Leib and Körper. Leib is the living, breathing, irreplaceable human being. Körper is that same person reduced to an object, a statistic, a cost, a corpse. This episode explores how Körper logic became embedded in the systems that shape everyday life.

From the invention of the arrow to the drone operator's console to the shareholder return calculation, the mechanism is the same: distance, abstraction, and the gradual erosion of our felt sense of other people's inherent worth. Our first act of resistance may be not political but perceptual. We must learn to recognize when we are objectifying people and choose, deliberately, to shift from a Körper to a Leib mindset.

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As mentioned in the podcast, you might be interested in two earlier podcasts that discussed how our mind struggles to balance two different ways of processing reality. 

THE EMPRESS AND HER DEPUTY

OUR MIND ARGUES WITH ITSELF.  

Transcript

Seeing Our Humanity Despite Systems That Deny It

Hi. This is Michael C. Patterson. Welcome to the Flourish In Times of Struggle podcast.

This series is an invitation to think together about how we can stay steady, compassionate, and engaged at a time when cruelty, corruption, and division have become increasingly normalized. Because I believe we can still envision, and work toward, a future in which we and our grandchildren flourish with dignity and purpose.

In our last episode, we explored Timothy Snyder's distinction between Negative and Positive Freedom — and why resistance alone is never enough. Today we go deeper, drawing on another of Snyder's powerful conceptual tools: two German words for body — Leib (pronounced Lyb) and Körper — that reveal fundamentally different ways of seeing and treating human beings. We'll explore how living, breathing human beings — Leib — get turned into abstractions and objects — Körper. We will look at how that process of dehumanization is built into the systems that shape our everyday lives, and why the first act of resistance may not be political but perceptual: a fundamental shift in how we see each other and ourselves.

LONG-DISTANCE VIOLENCE

How does a human being come to brutally beat another person, to shoot and kill, to drop bombs on schools and accept dead children as collateral damage?

Part of the answer may lie in distance.

There is speculation that the invention of the arrow changed the nature of human violence. It is genuinely difficult — physically and psychologically — for one person to kill another with their bare hands. The intimacy of it constrains us.  The pain and suffering being inflicted is immediate, obvious and embodied. When close to each other we feel each other’s pain; the pain we receive and the pain we inflict. 

But distance dissolves that resistance. An arrow shot from twenty paces delivers death without the visceral engagement of close combat. At a distance, the victim becomes less present — less a unique individual, less a parent or child, less a person with a history of relationships, hopes, and a future worth protecting.

Today we can drop bombs on cities from heights at which individual human beings are invisible. We can launch missiles from one country that destroy schools and hospitals in another country. We can destroy, kill and mutilate with complete ignorance of what we are doing — no sound, no face, no feedback from our nervous system about the consequences of our actions. The victim has been made, in every meaningful sense, abstract.

LEIB AND KORPER

In these conditions, living human beings have been reduced to objects, things, statistics, data points. In his book ON FREEDOM, Timothy Snyder notes that the German language has two words for body: Korper and Leib. It’s a useful distinction. 

Leib is a living, breathing body that has a dynamic existence that actively interacts with its environment. Korper, on the other hand, describes a human body that has been stripped of its humanity and been reduced to a thing. A corpse. A disposable abstraction. This is the abstraction that happens in war. Leib— living human beings are converted into abstract Korper through long-range weaponry. 

And, this abstraction of human life doesn't happen only in warfare. This conversion of Leib into Korper is built into the systems and assumptions that shape everyday life. And, turning human beings into objects is an insidious and powerful feature of systems of oppression. 

How does this transformation happen?  

How are Leib—living, unpredictable, creative human beings—turned into Korper, inanimate things? One way this happens, it seems to me, is through the misplacement—or, perhaps erosion—of values. 

We start out well enough. Human life, from the moment of birth is understood to be incredibly valuable. Every parent knows, in their bones, that their newborn child is priceless. That this life — breathing, sensing, reaching — is a kind of miracle. Every child’s potential for growth, intelligence and creativity deserves to be protected and nurtured. The value is self-evident. It doesn't need to be argued or demonstrated. It simply is.

But now consider an infant in a war zone.

For the fighter pilot flying at forty thousand feet, or the drone operator sitting at a console thousands of miles away, that same infant has been absorbed into a different value system entirely. Not a system organized around the preservation of life and the opportunity to live it — but one organized around strategic advantage, mission success, and the projection of military power. Within that system, the infant is not a miracle. It is a variable. A risk to be calculated. And if that precious life is destroyed by a bomb or a missile, it will be logged, if it is logged at all, as collateral damage.

The word is worth sitting with. Collateral. Secondary. Incidental. A regrettable side effect of something more important.

This is Körper logic at its most stark. The living, breathing, irreplaceable human being — Leib — has been subordinated to an abstraction. In this perversion of our values, the abstraction is what matters. The life is what is expendable.

But here is what makes this more than a critique of warfare: the same logic operates closer to home, with less visibility and less drama, but with the same underlying structure. The insurance company that denies medical coverage to a sick child is not dropping bombs. But the calculation shares a similar architecture — the child's inherent worth has been subordinated to another value system, one organized around profit/loss ratios, and shareholder returns. The child has become, within that system, a cost rather than a life. Körper rather than Leib.

The mechanism is identical. Only the context and the consequences differ.

This is what Timothy Snyder means when he says that Körper logic is not confined to warfare or to extreme historical moments like fascism or Stalinism. It is built into the everyday systems and assumptions that shape how we treat each other — who receives care and who doesn't, who is protected and who is expendable, whose life is treated as inherently valuable and whose must be earned.

So how did we get here? How did Körper logic become so pervasive?

HOW DOES KORPER COME TO DOMINATE?

How did Korper logic come to replace the more natural Lyb logic?

The human brain processes the world in two broad modes. In simplified terms, the right hemisphere experiences life directly and holistically — it perceives other human beings as living, breathing, irreplaceable presences, embedded in relationships, and worthy of care. It is the hemisphere of empathy, of felt connection, of Leib. The left hemisphere abstracts, categorizes, and quantifies. It turns direct experience into concepts, symbols, and metrics. It is the hemisphere of analysis, of language, of system-building. Both modes are necessary. Neither is sufficient alone.

But something happened — gradually, and without conscious design — that threw these two modes out of balance. The Industrial Revolution, and the capitalist systems that grew from it, made extraordinarily heavy use of left hemisphere thinking. Factories required standardization. Markets required quantification. Profit required calculation. The systems built during this period didn't just reward left hemisphere, abstracting, Körper modes of thought — they were constructed from them. And as those systems grew in complexity and reach, they reinforced the very mode of thinking that created them. A self-reinforcing feedback loop took hold: left hemisphere logic built systems that rewarded left hemisphere logic, which built more such systems, which rewarded it further still.

Some neuroscientists argue that this imbalance has neurological roots — that the very structure of the human brain makes us vulnerable to this kind of perceptual narrowing. Neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist describes this structural conflict in his book, The Master and His Emissary. He argues that the left hemisphere, which was meant to serve the right hemisphere's fuller, richer perception of the world, has gradually taken control of the mind and constructs a truncated version of reality devoid of a right hemisphere perspective. Thus, we believe in a skewed kind of reality. A reality of abstractions, metrics, and categories. A reality increasingly stripped of Leib.

Those who rose to power within these systems were shaped by them most completely. Not because they were cruel or deliberately indifferent to human suffering — but because the systems they inhabited rewarded a particular way of seeing, and punished another. The living human being — the Leib — gradually disappeared behind the abstraction. Behind the labor cost. The efficiency metric. The quarterly return. The collateral damage assessment.

And the rest of us were shaped by the same systems. We were educated within them, employed within them, governed by them, entertained by them. The Körper mindset seeped in — quietly, pervasively, without announcement. We began to measure our own worth by Körper standards: by productivity, by income, by status, by what we own and what we can demonstrate. We learned to see our neighbors as competitors rather than companions. We came to accept, almost without noticing, that some lives matter more than others.

Which is why the first act of resistance — before policy, before politics, before protest — may be perceptual. To recognize the Körper mindset when it operates in us. To notice when we have slipped into abstraction — when the living human being in front of us, or affected by our decisions, has become a variable, a category, a cost. And to reset. Deliberately. Toward the right hemisphere's fuller awareness. Toward Leib — the direct, holistic recognition of other human beings as irreplaceable, interconnected, and worthy of care simply because they are alive.

CONCLUSION

If today's discussion sparked your curiosity about the neuroscience behind left hemisphere dominance and its cultural consequences, I'd encourage you to check out my earlier episodes on Iain McGilchrist's work that draws from his books The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things. Links can be found in the show notes. McGilchrist's argument that left hemisphere dominance has reshaped modern culture in ways that impoverish our perception of the living world sits directly beneath everything we've explored today about Körper logic and what it would take to escape it.