...is by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who may be familiar to people here because he wrote the book The Pledge which Sean Penn based his film of the same name on.

One interesting aspect of that story is the obsession with doing the right thing at the expense of everything else around you. I think we see that a lot in life with people becoming so lost in a single cause that they will pursue that one thing no matter what their pursuit destroys along the way. Good cause, bad cause, noble, ignoble, does not matter...in fact the more noble the cause the more disgusting we are willing to be in our pursuit...which is what the story communicates rather well I think. I figured watching the film that must have been at least one of the things that drew Penn to the story.

I guess you could say that aspect of us has been covered many times in fiction, think Melville's Moby-Dick and we are prone to obsession as human beings...maybe because life is so random, hectic, confused, a divine chaos, a bedlam of our own design, that it soothes our minds to focus on some single point. Religion or meditation being what they are, lowering oneself to a point of nothingness or putting faith in a superior being seem to also be about the ability to "focus" the mind on a...well...black hole (because I think there is a vacuum there, an absence of chaos) to soothe ourselves. So obsession in a way can be about quieting the bedlam we are living in. It's interesting too that the talk show guys play on our natural tendency to obsess. Funny too that people sometimes say that "watching tv is a way to turn off my mind at the end of a day"...so obsession as a religion, tv as an altar to worship at...problem is I guess our minds don't turn off when we watch tv...we only think they do...