Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
Something else important to take into account is that Venat wasn't objecting to 'rebuilding but doing it wrong', but that the crowd didn't want to rebuild from disaster, they wanted to undo disaster.

Speaking literally, you can read this as just a semantic difference; they're standing in a ruined city, they want the city to not be ruined. But that's very much the wrong reading, it's very clear in the scene that they're coming from a fundamental angle of 'we want to go back to when this never happened'. They don't want to move on from suffering, they want to move backwards to the world where it hadn't reached them.
Which, I again point out, these people were traumatized. It is utterly natural during the time a person is within that traumatized state to want to go back to before the trauma occurred. It doesn't prove anything but that they were human, acting as all human beings do. It is not until much later, when the pain of the trauma has begun to pass and healing has begun that we realize the trauma has made us stronger. It would quite likely have been the same for them, had Venat given them that time.