More Human Foibleness

Stalin had the famous saying about a single death being a tragedy while millions of death are a statistic. It’s usually associated with his brutal genocides but I think he was also making a very astute remark about scope insensitivity. This is where our reactions to a situation do not increase in proportion as the terrible nature of the situation increases. For instance, when a million people die you do not feel 100,000 times more terrible than you would at an accident that kills 10. Here’s a basic intro but I also wrote about when I experienced it, namely when seeing a “protester dies” headline.

Time for another one. On the plane back to Sydney, one of the movies I saw was The Kids Are All Right. It was largely because of this review and recommendation by Greta Christina and boy did the movie deliver. Spoilers etc: the kids of Nic and Jules (a lesbian couple) look up Paul their sperm donor. They all get along swimmingly, to the point of him having a brief fling with Jules. Jules is doing some landscape design on Paul’s backyard but this ends up being a regular sex session. In the first few times, Jules is paranoid about the thought that an older Latino gardener she hires is onto them. During about the third time she walks out of the bedroom because she needs to give the gardener some directions and catches him in what she interprets as a smirk.

By this point I was already cringing. Jules, angry and entitled, starts to question him about his attitude and ends up firing him all over her own guilt at the fling. I reacted much worse than I would if it was another movie where the gardener had lost his life. Of course the reasons are obvious: behaviour like this hits much closer to home. Most of us are unlikely to kill anyone (at least not directly). But if you’re reading this blog you probably own a computer. Which means you’re quite likely to be in a position to hire some tradesman and have the power of their dismissal in your hands.

But I think this goes beyond a good moment in a pretty well-made drama. I see it as another case of scope insensitivity. It’s not that I am exaggerating how terrible it was for Jules to fire the gardener (although maybe it would be a smaller deal for someone else). It’s that as a human in a particular situation I can imagine the situation with enough fidelity to see how terrible it is. I can’t do this with a murder and I certainly can’t do this with 1000 or 1,000,000 murders. So the brain just gives up, and substitutes some “general bad feeling”.

And this is a real problem, not some endearing feature we all have. If we felt the negative effects of violence in proportion to how we feel in these instances of personal injustice, how different do you think the world would be now? At the very least there would be no WWIII under our noses.