Silence and Discipline in Public Tragedy

"The death of one man is a tragedy but the death of millions is a statistic," goes the oft-quoted saying of Joseph Stalin. Although cold and cruel, it taps into an innate fact – human emotions are unable to comprehend disasters with huge casualties as easily as the individual. Take war films for instance. Why is the audience indifferent when a bomb kills dozens of innocent men and women but when a soldier is killed by a sniper, they react with emotion? The reason is simple. We do not know the dozens of people killed in a blast but the soldier who is shot dead is someone familiar to us.