> The human psyche simply cannot handle that scale of unforgetting, unrelenting, unforgiving violation.
I don't like it either, and it's completely foreign to my (and almost everyone's) current way of living, but there are a lot of things about the current way of living that would have been completely foreign to anyone a century ago. (Imagine how previous generations would have felt about the quantity of information we make public, intentionally and un-, on social media!)
I am not defending or supporting this, but I think that it might be overambitious to declare (presumably without evidence beyond emotional reaction) what the human psyche can or cannot support.
Two centuries ago, the kind of thing that we post today on social media was common knowledge, passed from person to person as gossip. People that didn't have that trail of information were viewed with suspicion.
I know that the "oh noez social media" attitude that I might have seemed to be promulgating can be overblown, but I don't think that this response doesn't get at the heart of it. It's true that people in your community likely knew about you, and newcomers to a community would have had to build up that background of trust; but I think that there's a huge difference between the sort of reciprocal information sharing that goes on in physical communities, and the undifferentiated, omni-directional outward flow of information that social media makes possible.
I don't like it either, and it's completely foreign to my (and almost everyone's) current way of living, but there are a lot of things about the current way of living that would have been completely foreign to anyone a century ago. (Imagine how previous generations would have felt about the quantity of information we make public, intentionally and un-, on social media!)
I am not defending or supporting this, but I think that it might be overambitious to declare (presumably without evidence beyond emotional reaction) what the human psyche can or cannot support.