Poor people of Philippines. Can we possibly comprehend their situation? I don't think so. Dead people everywhere, and for who is left alive, there s no shelter, there s nothing to do, there s nowhere to go. There are by and large ten millions people affected by the storm on last Friday. Philippines is one of the poorest Southeast Asian nation. And I did not know but its also the third largest English- speaking nation after US and UK
We can send food and clothes, but they have hit rock bottom like none of us living in the rich world, ever experienced. The government declared a "state of national calamity" and help is hoped to arrive in time for the hundred of thousands of people that are now starving. Situation is worsened by the fact that many of them cannot be reached by road, only by helicopters. Hard to imagine as it is, people are actually sleeping and living by the roadside, as their houses were flattened by the storm. After stripping off malls for anything they could find, authorities are worried this chaos might lead to anarchy and social unrest. These people are known for their friendliness and their sense of humor, but now they re hungry, thirsty and in despair. A nation characterized by their strive for harmony in interpersonal relationships but also with nature and religion, it is now under so much psychological stress. Thousands of people will have to deal with the trauma for the rest of their lives and maybe generations to come.
We are humans, its in us to feel empathy, so the question remains why can't this feeling be amplified and carried onto situations where huge numbers of people are involved. We become somewhat numb to mass suffering and the first step to stop this from happening is to acknowledge that it is happening.
In "The hidden brain", by Shankar Vedantam, a book I stay fascinated with, long after I read it, and strongly recommend to everybody, he explains why people are likely to behave this way:
"We tend to think about people who are sympathetic to others as being moral, and those who are unsympathetic to others as being immoral. This is a useful heuristic, but I think it only takes us so far. The problem is that with many disasters, the people who care about fewer victims (or a single victim) are not doing it out of callousness toward the larger number of other victims, but because our internal compasses direct us to feel compassion toward the few.
I return to this idea over and over in The Hidden Brain. Our internal guide about moral behavior is often flawed. We regularly believe we are acting in moral and high-minded ways when the outcomes and data show we are not. It is one of the central contentions of the book that we need to get away from using our intuitions about goodness and badness to be our guide, and start using outcomes -- how many lives saved, how many jobs created, how many heart attacks averted -- to be our compass."
The typhoon disaster is well media covered and people all over the world get to see the extent of the tragedy. But like with the old Stalin quote, one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. Vedantam goes on and talks about how media works again in these situations.
"journalists are also doing what nonprofits are doing -- they have found, through trial and error, that the anecdotal story about the single victim is much more powerful to read than a dry story about thousands of victims. The central problem is not that reporters do not write stories about mass tragedy; the problem is that it is much more affective to write about the single victim. Those are the stories readers want to read and hear about; those are the stories that get placed on front pages and on magazine covers and on the evening news. The downside of this collective bias is that we are much less able to feel compassion -- and act responsibly -- toward groups that do not have single victims around whom we can wrap our empathy."
And when it comes to compassion, Vedantam talks about the "telescope effect", an evolutionary bias ingrained in our brain. Its the answer to why we spend so much money on our next of kin for example, when we do know the same money would make a life changing difference to these people.
I do feel very small and insignificant here and all I feel I can do is to say a prayer for those people. The pain and suffering they go through might as well be called hell, and the events that brought them in this state, the end of the world. Thank God, the world may be full of suffering, but is also full of overcoming it.
We are humans, its in us to feel empathy, so the question remains why can't this feeling be amplified and carried onto situations where huge numbers of people are involved. We become somewhat numb to mass suffering and the first step to stop this from happening is to acknowledge that it is happening.
In "The hidden brain", by Shankar Vedantam, a book I stay fascinated with, long after I read it, and strongly recommend to everybody, he explains why people are likely to behave this way:
"We tend to think about people who are sympathetic to others as being moral, and those who are unsympathetic to others as being immoral. This is a useful heuristic, but I think it only takes us so far. The problem is that with many disasters, the people who care about fewer victims (or a single victim) are not doing it out of callousness toward the larger number of other victims, but because our internal compasses direct us to feel compassion toward the few.
I return to this idea over and over in The Hidden Brain. Our internal guide about moral behavior is often flawed. We regularly believe we are acting in moral and high-minded ways when the outcomes and data show we are not. It is one of the central contentions of the book that we need to get away from using our intuitions about goodness and badness to be our guide, and start using outcomes -- how many lives saved, how many jobs created, how many heart attacks averted -- to be our compass."
The typhoon disaster is well media covered and people all over the world get to see the extent of the tragedy. But like with the old Stalin quote, one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. Vedantam goes on and talks about how media works again in these situations.
"journalists are also doing what nonprofits are doing -- they have found, through trial and error, that the anecdotal story about the single victim is much more powerful to read than a dry story about thousands of victims. The central problem is not that reporters do not write stories about mass tragedy; the problem is that it is much more affective to write about the single victim. Those are the stories readers want to read and hear about; those are the stories that get placed on front pages and on magazine covers and on the evening news. The downside of this collective bias is that we are much less able to feel compassion -- and act responsibly -- toward groups that do not have single victims around whom we can wrap our empathy."
And when it comes to compassion, Vedantam talks about the "telescope effect", an evolutionary bias ingrained in our brain. Its the answer to why we spend so much money on our next of kin for example, when we do know the same money would make a life changing difference to these people.
I do feel very small and insignificant here and all I feel I can do is to say a prayer for those people. The pain and suffering they go through might as well be called hell, and the events that brought them in this state, the end of the world. Thank God, the world may be full of suffering, but is also full of overcoming it.
No comments:
Post a Comment