Why is it that people care so much when a stranger near to them dies than when a million strangers on another continent die?
I mean, some high school kid drinks and crashes his car and the city is in mourning and the school is closed so everyone can attend his funeral. Some sociopath whacks his wife and it is national (neigh, international?) news for a year and a half. Hundreds of thousands of people are slaughtered, and no one bats an eyelash.
My theory behind all of this is that it is easier. So much easier to deal with one person killing another person, or a car crash, or whatever. There’s not much debate about it. It sucks to pretty much everyone. It has a simple and relatively painless solution. There is no need for action, no extra taxes, nothing complicated. There’s a trial and a funeral and everyone’s more or less moved on to the next commercial break.
To support this theory, I submit the following. Gang violence, especially in the 1980s-1990s in Los Angeles. Here you have proximity and interest correlation, but it is more like -0.2 than 1. However, people block out most of the deaths resulting from said violence because the issues involved are more complicated. It isn’t a -1 like Rwanda or DRC or Sudan or elsewhere, but it registers less than a suburb kid dying. So you have some caring because of proximity, and a good/bad factor - gangs are bad, their victims are good. Simple. You don’t have a Tutsi vs. Hutu factions and the incredibly complex situation that was there. But on the other hand, you have proximate causes of gangs, which disinterest people. They don’t want to hear about it.