manifesto woojin kim

George Saunders issues a sort of ironic and self-aware mission statement for People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction in Manifesto. In it, he humorously compares the actions of typical, everyday people to those of criminals, terrorists, sociopaths, and murderers, eventually drawing the point that his organization is “many,” that it is “worldwide.” The main argument of the entire piece is that we are far from killing in the name of a baseless notion. The daily actions of an average Joe going to work on a crowded freeway and a lady in Tokyo are mundane and will continue to be mundane. Nobody doesn’t have a crazy thought in their head, but thankfully most of us living in 2018 don’t do the first thing that comes to mind. Saunders may have wanted to show readers, through a bit of humor, how easy it is to be normal by creating the image of an organization that goes out of its way to do literally nothing.