Syria is once again the world’s premier theater of the absurd, a sun-drenched wasteland where the scenery changes but the script remains a monotonous tragedy written by idiots. As the latest rebel advances turn the region into a high-stakes game of musical chairs with artillery, we are treated to the predictable, agonizing refrain of the ‘Jihadi Jack’ saga. Jack Letts, the poster child for what happens when a middle-class Oxfordshire upbringing meets a terminal lack of common sense, is reportedly in danger of being left to die. His mother is distraught. The British government is, as always, performing its favorite impression of a brick wall. And I, for one, find the entire spectacle a perfect distillation of why humanity deserves the asteroid it’s clearly angling for.

Let’s analyze the players in this pathetic farce. First, we have Jack Letts, a man who traded the rolling hills of England for the dust-choked ruins of a caliphate that was never going to offer him anything but a shallow grave or a cage. To call it a ‘mistake’ is to call the Hindenburg a minor thermal incident. It was a deliberate, ideological pilgrimage into the mouth of madness. Now that the Syrian Democratic Forces are busy trying not to get liquidated by the latest wave of insurgents, Letts is stuck in a facility that is less a prison and more a waiting room for the inevitable. The irony is so thick you could choke on it: a man who allegedly rejected the West now finds his only hope for survival is the very state that he abandoned. It’s the ultimate ‘I want to speak to the manager’ moment of international terrorism.

Then we have the British government, a collection of spineless bureaucrats who have mastered the art of the tactical shrug. Whether it’s the previous pack of charlatans or the current crop of grey-suited managers, the policy remains the same: strip the citizenship, burn the paperwork, and hope the problem disappears into a mass grave before the next election cycle. They stripped Letts of his citizenship years ago, a move that is legally dubious but politically brilliant because it satisfies the bloodlust of the Right-wing tabloids without requiring the Left to actually come up with a solution. They would rather let sixty people, including thirty-five children, rot in a combat zone than risk the optics of a plane landing at Heathrow filled with people who didn't spend their holiday in the Algarve.

And let us not forget the 'public' and the shouting classes. On one side, you have the performative humanitarianism of the Left, who act as though bringing back sixty radicalized or traumatized individuals is as simple as a school bus trip, ignoring the logistical and security nightmare that follows. On the other, the Right-wing ghouls who salivate at the thought of children dying in the desert because their parents were fools. Both sides use these people as rhetorical footballs while the actual human beings involved—most of whom are children who didn't choose to be born in a war zone—are treated as inconvenient footnotes in a broader argument about 'values' that neither side actually possesses.

There are sixty people with UK connections currently engulfed by this fighting. Sixty. In the grand scheme of the millions displaced and killed in Syria, it is a rounding error. But it is a rounding error that highlights the complete moral bankruptcy of the nation-state. We are told that citizenship is a contract, yet the moment that contract becomes inconvenient for the state’s PR department, it is shredded. We are told that we are a civilized society that values the rule of law, yet we are perfectly content to let children pay for the sins of their fathers in a foreign hellhole because the paperwork is too messy.

Jack Letts’ mother fears he will die. He probably will. If not today, then in the next iteration of this endless cycle of religious and political violence. And when he does, the UK government will breathe a sigh of relief, the activists will move on to the next trend, and the world will continue to spin, blissfully indifferent to the fact that we have once again proven that we are a species incapable of anything more sophisticated than tribal abandonment. The Syrian clashes are just a backdrop for the real story: the absolute, unwavering commitment of humanity to be as disappointing as possible at every given opportunity. It’s not a tragedy; it’s a statistic waiting for a period at the end of the sentence.