Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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2021-12-16 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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blind
Votey panel for blind
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Explanation

This comic riffs on the famous Gandhi quote (often misattributed), "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." In the first panel, a character dismisses this saying by pointing out it doesn't actually work mathematically: if two people each take an eye from each other, that's only two eyes lost per pair, meaning both people would still have one eye each. Worse, a truly vengeful person would keep retaliating, taking more eyes than they lose.

The second character asks when you would ever use a saying like "an eye for an eye" with that level of literal precision. The first character replies: "Foreign policy." The other concedes, "I stand corrected."

The joke operates on two levels. First, there's the pedantic, literal deconstruction of a proverb that was never meant to be taken as a mathematical proposition. Second, and more pointedly, the punchline satirizes how foreign policy actually does operate on exactly this kind of cold, calculated, retaliatory logic -- where proportional response and escalation are analyzed with clinical precision, making the literal reading of "an eye for an eye" uncomfortably accurate in that context.

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