No, You Can’t Feel Sorry for Everyone

Humans are beings of limited capabilities. And so you can spot a liar right off is someone tells you that they care for *every* human equally, that they feel equally bad for every human death, no matter how distant or unknown. The only time such a person *isn’t* lying, either to you or themselves, is if they in fact feel *nothing.* For sociopaths, it’s true that they care every bit as much about some kid getting smooshed by a truck on the other side of the planet as they do for the kid smooshed by a truck in the street in front of them: they feel zero in either case.

Anyone telling you that they SuperCare (TM) about all the world is trying to sell you something, and they should be instantly untrusted. This should be obvious to all non-sociopaths: nearly everyone has experienced grief over the loss of a loved one. The suggestion that you could feel the exact same level of pain for all the thousands of people who will die just today, and *not* promptly either go insane, have a stroke, have a heart attack or collapse into a singularity, is clearly untrue. Such a person telling you this is virtue signalling atop a mountain of corpses.

There is, as the article linked above points out, another aspect to it: in-group vs. out-group. A family member of *mine* dying is going to affect me more than a family member of *yours*dying. A planeload of Americans crashes in Brightburn, Kansas, is going to affect me more than a planeload of Mongolians crashing in Mongolia.

People do care, newspaper editorialists and social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for victims of Brussels’ recent attacks and ignoring Yemen’s recent bombing victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote, than the ones that attract the most public empathy.

When Grumpy Cat died a week-ish ago, something I saw a fair amount of was religious conservatives complaining that the world was mourning the death of one cat, but not the deaths of thousands of the unborn that same day. And if to you the unborn are lives worthy of mourning, then that rather unhappy position makes sense. But you don’t need to go even that far: on the day Grump Cat died, how many children were sold into slavery? How many old people beaten to death so someone could steal a pittance? How many killed by drunk drivers, or bad/lazy doctoring? How many died due to cancer or other poisoning caused by coal burning power plants that should long ago have been replaced with clean, efficient nuclear reactors, but the environmentalists prevented? How many struck dead by lightning, or fell off buildings while working on them, or slipped on ice and cracked their skulls? The world is full to overflowing with tragedy. And humans, to maintain their sanity, have to put limits on their giveadamn.

And the fact is… for all the thousands of tragic deaths on the day Grumpy Cat died… for the great majority of the people who mourned (in some fashion) that one small cats death, the simple fact is that that one small cat meant far more to those people than any of those who died. I had heard of Grumpy Cat. I had derived minutes of entertainment from looking at Grumpy Cat photos and memes. The geographically nearest human death to me on that day? Didn’t know ’em.