the Loach saga: a Lou Gehrig's Disease of the spirit

The saga frames the brother's cynicism not as clear-sightedness but as illness — his faith in "the innate indwelling goodness of men" doesn't get argued away, it "spontaneously combusted," contracted "the way some twenty-five-year-old men contract Sanger-Brown's ataxia or M.S." The register-move is to pathologize the ironic-misanthropic position: the belief that "a basic absence of empathy and compassion" is "an ineluctable part of the human character" is presented as a degenerative condition of the soul, not a conclusion. And the cruelty of the disease is self-confirming — the brother reads even Barry's rescue-attempt as "self-interested #1-looking-out," so his cynicism can't be disproved from inside, only outlasted (as Day's is by Gately). The Challenge is the disease's empirical test, and it takes the one uninfectable person in Boston to win it.