Stephen Monrad

Us versus Them

The way we think about our friends and family is very different from how we think about strangers. People close to us affect us emotionally in ways that strangers cannot. If you hear about a fatal car accident on the highway on the news, you give it hardly a second thought. If your spouse is late coming home, you can work yourself into a tizzy of worry even though nothing has happened.

While it is rational to be more concerned about how people you interact with and rely on are doing, there seems to be an emotional component that is irrational. Journalists take advantage of this irrationality. They give details of the tragedies they uncover to try to draw people into the story. A death on a highway is forgettable. The death of a young driver who has recently beaten cancer and was moving his things from Toronto to his first year dorm at McGill after beating the odds draws us in.

Do we not care about other people simply because we don’t have the time to learn the details of their lives?

Every stranger could be a friend.

When you hear of a tragedy, imagine that you had met the people involved a year earlier. Imagine building a friendship up over weeks and months. Imagine how the tragedy would affect you if you knew them well. It is harder to ignore the plight of other people when you realize that they are not that different from the people you do care about.

Getting to know people takes time

I think the lack of caring about strangers in large communities is simply the result of how long it takes to get to know people. If the detail of the lives of all the people in your community could somehow be instantly implanted in your head, I believe you would care much more about what happens to people you don’t interact with.

How much should we care about strangers?

I don’t know if it would be better if we cared more about people we don’t know that well. What is clear, though, is that the size of the circle of people we do care about is determined by how quickly we can form meaningful relationships.