[W]ithin a large-scale setting, where the other lives at a distance, indifference can be more deadly than hate.  Whereas the fire of hatred flares up in the proximity of the other and then dies down, the cold indifference can be sustained over time, especially in contemporary socieites.  A "system" -- a political, economic, or cultural system -- insinuates itself between myself and the other.  If the other is excluded, it is the system that is doing the excluding, a system in which I participate because I must survive and against which I do not rebel because it cannot be changed.  I turn my eyes away (or I zoom in with a camera at some exotic exemplar of suffering, which amounts to turning the eyes away because it both satisfies my perverse desire to see suffering and appeases my conscience for having turned the heart away from the sufferer).  I go about my own business.  Numbed by the apparent ineluctability of exclusion taking place outside my will though with my colloboration, I start to view horror and my implication in it as normalcy.  I reason: the road from Jersusalem to Jericho will always be littered by people beaten and left half-dead; I can pass -- must pass -- by each without much concern.  The indifference that made the prophect, takes care also of its fulfillment.

-- Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, pg. 77