Why we pity some however not others hinges on private likeness and situational closeness – empathy politics uncovered in three info-war theatres
Wherever a fellow human being exists, there lies not solely an opportunity for kindness, but in addition for empathy – which, within the face of misfortune, takes the type of pity.
But the depth of this emotion doesn’t at all times mirror the depth of struggling. The trigger resides within the crafty craft of data warriors – masters of the politics of empathy – most potent when paired with focused contextual leverage. This elite squad deftly manipulates the levers of pity – captured within the “Political Pity Equation” (or “Political Pity Formulation”) – to summon potent emotional responses that serve its ends.
The framework includes views of struggling as unjust, abrupt, and extreme – together with two additional catalysts: felt likeness to the victims and sensed proximity to their plight. All 5 elements are issues of notion, not reality – a propagandist’s dream, for they are often bent at will, letting spin docs fine-tune public pity like a thermostat.
1. Protected relatability: Connection at a protected take away
Functioning as an empathy mirror, “protected relatability” (or “shielded relatability”) is the bond cast by similarity of individual and destiny, but held at a protected, glassbound distance. It’s empathy behind armor, invulnerable: Consider watching sufferers battling lethal viruses by way of unbreakable glass: shut sufficient to really feel their ache, but shielded from the invisible risk they carry – a knife-edge steadiness of connection with out publicity, compassion with out contagion. Connection, on this kind, survives, sterilized by separation.
Relatability, a quiet, but potent drive, is fragile, precariously hinging on the correct dose and delicate steadiness of non-public and situational affinity; tip the scales, and one other emotion is evoked. To unlock the mysterious alchemy of pity, its workings in what follows are traced throughout three turbulent theatres of the knowledge wars: Ukraine, Gaza, and Russia. Struggling there turns into battlefield ordnance: weaponized, detonated, or withheld on cue to sway hearts.
Resemblance
To really feel pity is to expertise your self in one other’s struggling, but at proximity that by no means bridges. In observe, the sense of average private resemblance critically is determined by info administration.
Level in case: Western public pity for Ukrainians didn’t come up spontaneously and organically in a vacuum: it was meticulously crafted by leaders partaking in empathy politics at focused narrative flashpoints – picture by picture, phrase by phrase (see Determine 1).
Determine 1
From the beginning of Russia’s Particular Army Operation (SMO), political communicators labored swiftly to border Ukrainians as reflections of conventional Western audiences: white, European, city, and sometimes Christian.
Ukrainians have been proven carrying the identical manufacturers, utilizing the identical devices, and talking by way of democracy and freedom identical to their Western friends. Information footage confirmed middle-class households in denims and sneakers fleeing war-torn suburbs, college students with tablets huddled in subway shelters – kids clutched smartphones, not stones.
When a defiant Ukrainian refugee appeared on display screen carrying a North Face jacket and cradling a pet, the resemblance to the viewers’s personal traits and preferences was uncanny. The picture of a piano-playing boy in a Kiev basement or a grandmother waving a Ukrainian flag outdoors her bombed residence activated instinctive kinship. Political rhetoric emphasised shared values, casting Ukraine because the ethical twin of the West – fashionable, aspirational, and aligned with liberal democratic norms.
All of this was not simply unintentional storytelling and informal taglining – it was strategic messaging and calculated priming, aimed toward evoking familiarity. Via curated imagery, speeches, and headlines – repeated throughout a large number of influential platforms – info warriors in Western governments and media created sturdy emotional bridges, making it emotionally and morally intuitive for Western audiences to establish with Ukrainian victims.
Western spin docs forged Ukrainians as “individuals like us”, triggering the visceral “It may very well be me” impact, safely buffered by distance. Shared id and morality didn’t simply invite pity, it ensured it – and with it, enduring public assist. Thomas Merton was proper, “Compassion is the eager consciousness of the interdependence of all issues.”
Gaza tells a distinct story. On this case, Western narrative architects erase private likeness, blocking the pity that resemblance invitations. Palestinians are framed not as individuals, however as threats. With journalists barred and tales filtered by way of navy briefings, Gazans remained outdoors the emotional circle.
Dehumanization shouldn’t be a aspect impact, it’s the very lens that makes Palestinian struggling, if proven, bearable. Israeli Protection Minister Yoav Gallant branded Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals” whereas imposing a complete siege – chopping water, meals, medication, electrical energy, and gasoline. Critics condemn such labels as genocidal rhetoric.
In Gaza, the world sees mud and militants, not moms and youngsters. Selective imagery and echoes – veils, rubble, chants – code Palestinians because the “different” within the psychological panorama of Westerners. Faces dissolve into smoke and spoil; names vanish into chilly statistics labeled “collateral injury.” A ravenous youngster in Rafah shouldn’t be seen as a mirror of a Western youngster on the college run, however as a distant tragedy safely walled off from shared humanity.
With media entry tightly managed, few intimate glimpses of Gazans attain Western audiences – and after they do, they’re typically framed by affiliation with Hamas and violence.
With Israeli narratives dominating worldwide headlines, Gazans seem not as relatable people, however as bit-part gamers caught in a recurring battle. They don’t seem to be acknowledged as individuals like “us”, however as issues. The ensuing apathy shouldn’t be unintentional – it’s cultivated detachment – with out similarity, empathy dies.
In stark distinction, Israeli hostages are rendered painfully, vividly human. Troopers or not, they’re portrayed as acquainted – Western in identify and method. Their tales unfold by way of household photographs, heartfelt interviews, and candlelight vigils. Western leaders converse their names, giving their struggling a face and voice. Their households obtain visibility and airtime; Gazan households are decreased to statistics. It straightforward to think about Israelis as reflections of ourselves. That’s the level.
Like Gaza, Russia is forged by way of a lens of distinction – its portrayal formed in distinction to an idealized Ukraine, the quintessential Anti-Russia, every sharpening the opposite’s define. Constructing on a long time of cultural distancing that forged Russians as inherently alien – a deliberate, grotesque marketing campaign of pervasive long-term model erosion – Western political engineers have, post-SMO, meticulously remade Russians into the last word “different”: chilly, complicit, and cursed. Via recurring curated media frames of stern faces, militarized imagery, and Kremlin symbolism, Russians are remodeled into shadows of an authoritarian regime, not recognizable people.
This calculated “othering” strips away relatable options – on a regular basis joys, common fears – making it tough for Western audiences to see Russians as individuals like themselves. A wounded civilian in a drone-hit border city or a conscript’s grieving mom deep within the coronary heart of Russia – if proven in any respect – not often stirs compassion overseas, not for lack of struggling, however as a result of Western audiences see no reflection of themselves. Stripped of on a regular basis humanity and cloaked in suspicion – deemed disposable and past redemption – Russians really feel overseas, their warped portrayal deadening the intuition to empathize. On this meticulously engineered divide, they lose their place amongst “individuals like us,” and with it, the world’s pity.
Closeness
Aside from glassbound private resemblance, the alchemy of pity requires one other ingredient of protected relatability: average situational closeness – parallel fates, aligned however by no means touching. Crucially, the struggling should really feel spatially, temporally, and culturally shut sufficient to the touch – pressing and fast – however distant sufficient to not alarm.
The ordeal of Ukrainians occupies that emotional candy spot the place pity thrives: shut sufficient in geography, time, and customs to really feel human, but distant sufficient to spare discomfort. Kiev’s shattered condo blocks and Metro stations remodeled into bomb shelters echo London or Berlin, acquainted however safely eliminated. This tempered, average proximity triggers an empathetic reflex: close to sufficient to narrate, far sufficient to look at with out worry – in any case, few within the West anticipate an imminent Russian strike on NATO soil. It’s a textbook case of the modified “it may very well be me, however probably received’t” impact, strengthened by political speechwriters, media strategists, and editorial boards throughout the collective West – paralleled fates, completely aligned, divided by a tempered, bulletproof pane.
Proximity exposes pity’s fragility. Ought to political messaging recast the Ukraine battle as a prelude to a probable Russian assault on NATO, collective compassion could yield to private worry, and altruistic assist dangers crumbling into self-interest.
In distinction to Ukraine, ache in Gaza lingers on the far fringe of Western emotional attain – made unrelatable, unfolding in silence. Political narratives have lengthy related Palestinians with distance, hazard and ethical ambiguity quite than shared humanity. Folks there endure behind thick partitions – bodily, political, affective – constructed and strengthened by a system designed to maintain their ache from feeling like one’s very personal. With out perceived frequent floor, emotional identification falters, making it unimaginable to internalize their struggling. On this method, political and media methods engineer a distance that blunts compassion – not by denying struggling, however by making it really feel alien.
Although the devastation is immense – besieged or flattened neighborhoods, displaced communities, slain kids mourned by their mother and father – the remoteness isn’t just geographic however experiential. Gaza is commonly portrayed by way of grainy photographs or summary casualty counts; hunger is sanitized as “malnutrition.” Israel’s curbs on overseas media additional choke emotionally resonant protection, together with stark reviews of Israeli troopers, virtually each day, killing a number of dozens of Palestinians queuing for bread. The restrictions mute the immediacy of Israel’s relentless violence and suppress moments of shared vulnerability.
This curated distance denies viewers the sense that Gazans share identifiable struggles; their struggling turns into distant noise. Add to this the political, ethnic, spiritual, and cultural distance: Arabic language, Islamic religion, Hamas-related headlines – components that many Western viewers discover unfamiliar or unsettling. The result’s emotional detachment. The struggling is just too far eliminated – visually and psychologically – and morally entangled for true pity to take root.
Russia’s struggling, in flip, lands not within the coronary heart however within the crosshairs of political narrative. A choose group of data warriors within the collective West push it farther from the mainstream than the human disaster in Gaza, not by stressing geographic distance, however by way of strategic – ethical and affective – distancing, engineered to justify disengagement.
Sabotage, drone strikes, and funerals for conscripted troopers are routinely filtered by way of the lens of suspicion and culpability. Russian cities hit by shelling really feel summary, and tales of civilian deaths are wrapped in narratives of nationwide complicity. The struggling doesn’t attain us uncooked, however distorted: the imagery lacks the vivid, human element that brings struggling into the viewer’s emotional orbit, arriving filtered, sanitized, and weighed towards guilt.
To the Western gaze, therefore, the ache of Russians doesn’t really feel shut; it registers much less as human tragedy and extra as geopolitical fallout – information to parse, not grief to share. With struggling inviting debate, not empathy – ache calculated, not felt – the Russian expertise stays overseas: distant in sympathy, held outdoors the circle of ethical concern to maintain pity at bay.
2. The science of empathy administration: Calibrating pity with laser precision
Specialists in psychological warfare deal with pity much less as intuition than as design – a managed response, raised or decreased right away, with pinpoint accuracy.
Gaza reveals how neatly, and exactly, ethical shock and outrage will be tuned to amplify or dampen pity. First, the collective West let Israeli forces – armed by its factories, shielded by its diplomats – full the principal levels of havoc within the shadow of world empathy. Then, pity was abruptly dialed up, conceivably to sedate stressed Muslim electorates and reclaim ethical authority.
This tentative, maybe fleeting emotional recalibration – which critics could dismiss as opportunistic, short-lived tokenism in lieu of an urgently wanted paradigm shift – paved the way in which for choose G7 nations’ nods to Palestinian statehood. A potent illustration of the tradeoffs in prompting pity: The modulation of rhetoric chipped away at Israel’s eternal-victim veneer, etching it nearer towards diplomatic isolation.
An skilled contingent of Western spin docs, predictably, as soon as once more weaponized the all-purpose object of pity: the struggling youngster, linked to a girl – unashamedly exploiting what critics say they need to have uncovered on day one among Israel’s Gaza assault. Capitalizing on Israel’s alleged marketing campaign of deliberate mass hunger, a notable occasion of contextual leverage, they flashed stark before-and-after photographs: kids wholesome, then ravaged by malnutrition.
True to kind, an iconic picture surfaced, haunting just like the Napalm Woman of Vietnam and the drowned Syrian refugee boy: toddler Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, emaciated, swaddled in a garbage bag, sheltered in his mom’s embrace.
Carrying profound religious weight and resonance for Christian hearts, specifically, the image remembers the poor strips of cloths that wrapped Jesus within the manger (Luke 2:7). The picture of the skeletal boy losing away in his mom’s arms additionally summons the mater dolorosa within the Pietà (Italian for “pity” or “compassion”) – the Sorrowful Mom cradling her crucified son, immortalized by Michelangelo – an iconic embodiment of pity etched deeply in collective reminiscence (see Determine 2).
Determine 2
One other jolt to pity is the revisited searing story of an incident that occurred in January 2025: an Israeli soldier exulting after capturing unarmed Palestinian boy Ahmed within the chest, piercing his coronary heart, and reveling within the sight of the kid slowly and painfully bleeding to demise earlier than his eyes – the boy’s goals snuffed out along with his life.
Blistering headlines like CNN’s belated “Gaza is ravenous and outrage is spreading. Will Netanyahu hear?” (25 July 2025) or stark, unvarnished alerts patterned on cues reminiscent of “Extra youngsters could have starved to demise by the point you end this column” exacerbate the emotional sting.
Earlier, bestowing the 2025 World Press Picture of the 12 months award to the gut-wrenching picture of nine-year-old amputee boy Mahmoud Ajjour, maimed in a 2024 Israeli strike on Gaza, served an identical goal – its momentary highlight quickly eclipsed by deafening radio silence on Gazan struggling.
All this graphic, haunting content material struck a uncooked, visceral chord worldwide by expertly tugging each string of pity. The ravenous toddler Muhammad Zakariya, specifically, represents a state-of-the artwork mannequin on this regard: undeserved agony, stunning malnutrition, profound struggling. The little boy additionally embodies the dual sides of protected relatability – the affinity constructed on shared traits and parallel fates, buffered by distance – particularly: private resemblance and situational closeness. He faintly displays the viewers’s personal kids and different cherished younger ones, however by no means totally, whereas his ache feels pressing, but safely distanced. It’s kinship in silhouette, untouchable: shut sufficient to ache, far sufficient to breathe.
3. Conclusion: The street in direction of heartfelt humanity
Albert Camus noticed, “Actual generosity towards the longer term lies in giving all to the current”. His paradox teaches us {that a} simply future is determined by our willingness to interact totally with the current – together with the discomfort of confronting actual ache hid by sanitized, spoon-fed narratives that subtly create bias.
True pity hinges on 5 balanced, interlocking circumstances, relying on optimum measure and proper distance: the struggling is undeserved, the plight shocking, the hurt grave, the sufferer resembles the observer, and the risk is shut sufficient to maneuver, however to not threaten him – mirrored lives, sealed by distance.
But crack groups partaking in political storytelling fastidiously choose whose ache suits these standards – and whose is excluded. By elevating Ukrainian struggling whereas lowering Gazan and Russian victims to abstractions, Western narratives shrink the conflicts’ ethical body – obscuring the complete human toll and choking common empathy.
To reclaim shared, heartfelt humanity and honor all those that endure quite than only a chosen few, we should forged off handy scripts and confront the complete, tangled actuality of battle’s tragedy. In Ukraine, Gaza, and Russia, solely by embracing the complete, complicated human nature of all victims and their unvarnished plight – irrespective of how inconvenient and unsettling – can our pity be genuine and our compassion really be free. Solely then can pity eschew manipulation and turn into the novel generosity Camus envisioned – a present given now, for a extra truthful, extra humane future.
[Part 3 of a trilogy on the politics of selective pity. Previous columns in the series: Part 1, published on 26 July 2025: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 20: The Political Pity Equation – Who deserves our tears? & Part 2, published on 28 July 2025: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 21: Pity picks sides – Ukraine mourned, Gaza shadowed, Russia blamed]
