I agree w/Jesse Singer’s main proposition – we are too quick to label tragedies ‘accidents’ and assign individual blame and causality in our society. This is why it takes so long to regulate industries whose services and products can put millions in danger.
To my mind, it’s related to our problem with the entire concept of ‘public health.’ We simply refuse to pause and follow the causal chain backward from a large data set of similar ‘incidents’ like a detective chasing a serial killer. When we insist on doing this using modern technology (perhaps) to ‘trigger’ pattern recognition across seemingly unrelated, one-off incidents, we can boost society’s ability to self-regulate and prevent needless deaths.
But the real issue Singer bumps up against in her book is that our cultural bias toward individualism distorts our ability to quickly detect tragedies caused by systemic or sociological forces we, as a society, simply refuse to acknowledge. And we refuse to acknowledge social forces, because they demote or ‘humiliate’ our inflated sense of individual choice and autonomy.
In most of human history, though, the concept of ‘autonomy’ was never a ‘right’ or even a ‘desire.’ It was actually the last resort of the banished, shunned and expunged. In reality, Americans live under hundred of culturally and legally imposed self-limitations. We just choose NOT to interpret new events from the perspective of broader causes. It’s honestly an interpretive bad habit we’ve learned. Our media constantly reflect it and encourage it.
The gap between how the world operates and how we perceive it has stretched to an unholy and dangerous level, in part, because we just do not value sociological insight or teach it rigorously at the high school level.