Progress-driven benevolence can enable destruction only when fixed on a distant target

Evidence

While the tiny beings below her run for their lives, she wears a strange and benevolent expression aimed not at them but at something else in the distance—the imagined target of progress. It’s only with her gaze fixed on this target that she can trample on hundreds of species and thousands of years’ worth of knowledge without ever breaking her pallid smile. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 635

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Destructiveness rises with both damage salience and coordination — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 726