When Atrocities Become Background Noise
Last week, Nicholas Kristof reflected on how entire cities can be destroyed — and yet barely register in our collective attention. Nearly twenty years after “Save the Darfur Puppy,” the pattern remains painfully familiar: mass suffering struggles to break through.
One way to counter this indifference is by restoring singularity.
The BBC has published several first-person video testimonies from Sudanese survivors —people describing displacement, hunger, fear, and loss in their own words.
These are not statistics. They are individual lives, speaking directly to the camera. When we encounter them one by one, something shifts. The suffering becomes harder to ignore.
This is the same psychological dynamic Kristof highlighted years ago, and one that Arithmetics of Compassion has returned to often: we respond to identifiable people far more than to abstract numbers.
As the year closes, the question isn’t whether atrocities are happening. It’s whether we are still able — or willing — to see the people suffering from them.
You can read more about these dynamics — and the psychological biases that shape what we notice, care about, and ultimately respond to — in the following AOC pieces, which explore the singularity effect and the costs of looking away.
Peanut the Squirrel and the Power of Compassion
Forget Me Not: A Lesson About Valuing Lives of the Many and the Few