What happens when we stop thinking of people as people and start thinking of them as statistics? In an increasingly online world — where many interact with people online more than in real life — the subjective experience of others is being forgotten. In this piece, Nicholas Smyth argues that the internet and other modern trends have created a new, modern dysfunction. The antidote is to re-emphasise the subjective experience of others.

Writing from California in 1916, Alexander Berkman offered this observation:

There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China. It is not … that a feeling of national kinship with the waif impresses us the more sincerely with his plight. It is merely that the mind is unable to grasp suffering in the gross. Suffering is so intimately personal a thing that it must be explained through the personal equation.