Compassion fails when sufferers are nameless collectives rather than visible individuals.

Evidence

It is very remarkable that the disappearance of the individual behind the totality serves, or even intensifies, the questionable character of this procedure, even in cases when also the subjugated party is a collectivity. The psychological re-creation of suffering the essential vehicle of compassion and tenderness fails easily if the sufferer is not a namable or visible individual but only a totality, which has no subjective states of mind, so to speak. It has been noted that English communal life has been characterized, throughout its history, by extraordinary justice toward persons and by equally great injustice toward groups. — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 5837

Categorization

• CANDY: Simmel’s English paradox — just to persons, unjust to groups: Dissenters, Jews, Irish, Hindus — is a compact, quotable observation.
• SEED: Potential essay on how statistical/population-scale suffering (genocide numbers, wartime casualties) fails to move conscience the way a single named victim does.