Droppie [AU] 🐨♀🌈🐧🦘canberratimes.com.au/story/922…
First day in a newspaper office, early 1980s: Editors shouting. Reporters muttering. Photographers bragging. Telex machines chattering. Typewriters clacking. Clouds of cigarette smoke drifting in the currents of an exhausted air conditioning system.
Despite this sensory overload your eyes are drawn to a poster on a wall, a reminder to all about the rules governing the coverage of global tragedies.
"The life of one Australian," the poster declares, "equals two Englishmen, four New Zealanders, eight Americans, 16 Europeans, 32 Chinese, 64 Africans..."
On it goes, the arithmetic of human worth growing more grotesque with every line, culminating in a final grim equation - an Australian life is worth 500,000 Bangladeshi lives. It's gallows humour, of course, the kind that thrives in places where endless bad news must be processed, polished and published before the next tragedy arrives.
But like all dark satire the poster carries an uncomfortable truth: not all deaths are treated equally.
Four decades later that crude equation feels less like a cynical joke and more like an instruction manual.
Consider the morbid mathematics of the past few weeks.
World cheers as a single American airman is rescued by special forces in Iran's Zagros Mountains.
World shrugs as more than 3000 die during relentless air raids on Lebanon and Tehran.
World cheers as four astronauts splash down safely in the Pacific after perilous re-entry to Earth.
World shrugs as bodies of hundreds of children and medical workers are pulled from the rubble of flattened Middle Eastern neighbourhoods .
Callous? No. A little racist? Perhaps. The truth? We are selective with our empathy and the reason is deeply and stubbornly human.
Psychologists call it the "identifiable victim effect" - we care more about one person, or a small group of people we can easily picture in our minds, than thousands of faceless victims.
Why do you think international charities pitch images of individual children living in squalor while telling us how a measly 50 cents a day can improve their lives and those of others in their village? Our brains are wired for storytelling. Our empathy requires a narrative - preferably with an image to tug at our heartstrings.
But when confronted by the suffering of an anonymous multitude we disengage. A rescue effort for a little girl trapped at the bottom of a well will be broadcast live to a compassionate and rapt worldwide audience. Remember the Beaconsfield mine rescue that captivated the world?
But blink and you'll miss the images of the latest African nation gripped by famine.
It's why the phrase so often misattributed to Stalin - "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" - contains a perverse truth about the human condition. It's not because we don't care. It's because we cannot care enough.
Our empathy is not an infinite resource. When I encountered that poster with its crude truth hanging in my first newspaper office, bad news arrived in the morning paper. If you wanted updates you turned to radio and television. But algorithms now deliver tragedy by the minute. We are exposed to more catastrophe than any previous generation yet there is no escaping our inability to handle it.
Other factors play a role. "Ingroup empathy bias" - identifying more with those who share our nationality, culture and even our favourite football team - is little more than ancient tribal instincts dressed in modern clothing. There's also "psychic numbing" - as the numbers involved in a tragedy soar, our emotional response cannot scale equally. It collapses instead.
It's not a flattering picture. We'd like to think we're better than that - shouldn't human compassion be limitless? But the reality is that we live in a world built on assumptions as crude as that old newsroom poster.
For years governments have been employing an economic term - the Value of a Statistical Life - when deciding how to spend funds for everything from road safety to healthcare and clean air initiatives. In Australia that number currently values a life at $5.87 million.
Is that so different to the gallows humour of that newsroom poster? It's a tough question without a simple answer.
Which is why, like our finite reserves of empathy, it's easier to shrug and look away.
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