Which is Worse, Murder or Genocide?

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This is not a moral invective but a scientific fact: We care more about one murder than a genocide.

It’s a truth both Joseph Stalin and Mother Teresa lived by. He said, “One man’s death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” She said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at one, I will.”

The mental flaw responsible for the moral one is exposed in this psychology study: “Donations to aid a starving 7-year-old child in Africa declined sharply when her image was accompanied by a statistical summary of the millions of needy children like her in other African countries. The numbers appeared to interfere with people’s feelings of compassion toward the young victim,” writes Paul Slovic.

So the more people dead or in danger, the less we care. It’s the reason we’ve said, “Never again,” over and over again after the Shoah, then Cambodia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. But still so few Americans recognize the name, Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president who has already orchestrated the killing of at least 200,000 people. That’s at least 199,999 too many to grasp—are your eyes glazing over already?

For more on “psychic numbing” or “compassion fatigue,” check out Slovic’s slide presentation. Also watch our photo essay on Darfur.

From a previous Blue Marble post, another explanation of our blindness to injustice is system-justification theory. People want to see the world as fair and just, so they blame the victim to help themselves feel better about the status quo.

Rwandan_Genocide_Murambi_skulls.jpg

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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