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ostfuidctyvm It is absolutely fake for the very reasons you mention here.
You blur grief and empathy. They are not interchangeable. They operate on very different psychological levels.
Grief is an inward response to personal loss or parasocial familiarity, while empathy is an outward, moral recognition of the suffering of others
even when you have no personal connection.
Treating selective grieving for famous figures as evidence of “empathy” is misleading, because what is really being described is something we call
familiarity driven affect, not empathy.
I.e parasocial bonds, availability bias, and the identifiable victim effect make known figures feel emotionally closer than anonymous millions. Acknowledging the mechanism shouldn’t justify it by conflating it with empathy. It is what empathy is not.
Selective grief as you call it might be understandable, but when it is mislabeled as empathy, it normalizes selective outrage: the tendency to react only when the victim is familiar, famous, or politically convenient. That tendency becomes deeply corrosive when scaled to world events.
And here is the critical point, this isn’t about the occasional failure to empathize with distant strangers. We are talking about the deaths of millions:wars, famines, displacements, genocide, cases of mass s abuse...millions all ignored for years. .. When political attention consistently centers individual high profile losses while remaining silent about systemic, mass death, the conflation of grief with empathy does real harm.. It builds a hierarchy of whose lives count and whose deaths are deemed “grievable.” That hierarchy is not a neutral human quirk, it is shaped by media exposure, cultural bias, and political strategy.
So selective statements about prominent figures are not evidence of empathy, they are evidence of political necessity and symbolic capital.
Ordinary people’s selective grieving is not evidence of empathy either, they are cognitive bias and parasocial attachment. Real empathy does not demand that you grieve every death, but it does demand that you care consistently about the principle, not once in few years, consistently, that you resist the slide into numbness simply because the victims are faceless or countless. It does demand that .. and it is not "grief" and none of it would legitimize indifference to systemic injustice, and allows selective outrage to masquerade as natural.
If you accept that indifference, you resign yourselves to a world where the lives of millions can vanish without moral recognition while the death of a single known figure becomes international tragedy.. if it hasn't already.. you allow distortion that isn’t just psychologically inaccurate . It is an ethical failure perpetuating silence in the face of mass suffering.
