Tony looked up at him, chewing slowly. "You don't actually think that," he said, although his objection came more from surprise than doubt - Jarvis weren't really in the habit of making idle pronouncements, not in his experience. "Do you think that? Everyone cares?"
He didn't think that - not at all. Tony would have laid money on almost no one caring enough about other people to give a damn whether they wound up fodder for the Capitol's methodical system of incentives, threats, punishments, rewards. Sure, family ties could be powerful, and friendship had made him do some really breathtakingly stupid things, but he remembered how quickly affection and loyalty had gone out the window when death had reared its head in the arena. He'd liked one of the girls from 5 (there had been four tributes altogether, that year - double the number, for the Quell), sixteen years old and almost as cheerful as him in the face of impending horror. He'd still left her to bleed out under a cassia tree. Whether he'd never cared at all or had simply found it incredibly easy to stop, he couldn't really say. It had been a long time, and he tried not to think about it - like he tried not to think too deeply on most things involving other people - but the result was the same. He didn't believe it; he certainly didn't see why Jarvis would believe it, Jarvis, who hadn't done anything, not really, and who'd been taken and mutilated even though his family hadn't been alive to punish.
"I don't think that." He gave a dismissive wave. "Fine - he cares. I'll give you that. He's the type. But most people care about themselves. That's all it comes down to, for them." He didn't say it with any real judgment or disapproval. That was what people were supposed to do - it seemed only natural, having come up in a world where real sympathy, real selflessness, would have undermined the most prominent symbol of law and order. And then to turn around and find someone like Rogers scowling at you like you were something he'd found under a rock, just because you looked out for number one the way you were supposed to - well, there was some dissonance, there.
"And I mean - what's the point? The people he cares about are screwed because he cares about them." He didn't usually slip into this kind of talk - serious topics were best avoided when you wanted to look like you were above it all - and he looked a little embarrassed, stuffing the last of his fruit into his mouth, perhaps in an attempt to give himself something to do besides keep talking. But it didn't help; really, nothing ever did. "You can care about right, or you can care about people. You have to pick one." Pursuing the former would doom the latter; choosing the latter would preclude the former. "You don't get to have your cake and eat it."