It is a sunny afternoon when Ravi gets a call on his phone. The caller on the other side shares the sad news of his oldest colleague passing away due to a heart attack. Ravi goes silent for a moment; he then gathers himself and offers his condolences on the phone. After the call is over Ravi walks to his family and shares the news of his colleague passing away.
On hearing this news one of his family members asks, “How did he die, as in what was the reason for his death?” Ravi replies “He died of a heart attack”. The family member pauses for a moment, processes the information, and says “Oh so it was not of COVID”. Ravi who has still not totally recovered from the news asks that family member “How does it matter, I mean a death is a death”. The family member just looks at Ravi and has nothing else to offer. The member knows what Ravi is saying is rational, but somehow the sting of death from a heart attack does not seem to be as much as the sting of death from COVID to that member.
So what does this small story indicate? Do some deaths matter more than others? Is the life lost due to COVID more deserving of empathy and attention than a person who died from a heart attack? If yes why does this Olympics of Death exist? Why do we behave in this manner as a species? Also is this behavioural pattern only restricted to COVID?
Take this analogy as an example; we recently heard the shocking news of the police recovering bodies of 22 security personnel who were killed in an encounter with the Maoists in Chhattisgarh. The whole nation mourned the death of our brave security personnel and condemned the attack by the Naxals. But, a few months ago at least 56 civilians were killed on a Saturday after terrorists attacked two villages in southwestern Niger.
Now did we have the same reaction to those 56 civilian deaths like we did for the 22 soldiers? If no why do we behave this way? Why are our reactions to human tragedy based on our proximity to the person or that country? I think we can partly answer all these questions based on evolutionary biology and psychology.
We can start with Hamilton’s rule of Kin selection. This is the evolutionary strategy where an organism cares about the reproductive success of its relatives at a cost to the organism’s own survival. Extrapolating from this concept we come to Kin altruism where we behave in an altruistic manner towards our own immediate kin with whom we share our genes. This would partly explain why we care about the death of our own relatives far more than the death of outsiders. Now if expanded this to the level of a society based on cultural evolution it could answer why we would mourn the deaths of the personnel in Chhattisgarh and not pay attention to the civilians in Niger. The personnel in Chhattisgarh are part of that “family” that we have created in our brain through the concept/meme of Nation States. So the death of the member of the Republic of India would mean a lot more than the death of a citizen of Niger.
But it still does not answer the hierarchy of deaths that we have created within our own regional subset as far as COVID-related deaths are concerned. What explains the dull reaction to death via heart attack and a sense of shock to a death caused by COVID?
William James says “The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character; and it is a notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, what we remember best.”
This version of the availability bias partially explains why we tend to care about more COVID-related deaths far more than any other deaths that are happening right now. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow Kahneman writes “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.”
It would not take a rocket scientist to gather that the reason we have created this hierarchy of deaths is that the media keeps on covering COVID on an hourly basis. This is not a judgment call on whether the media should or should not cover it. Nor is it an attempt to shame anyone. This is an attempt to make sense of how can a human being become so cognitively numb that they reach a psychological state where any other death seems like a number/blip in comparison to COVID.
We are told that every life matters. Yes every life does matter, but no one ever utters the “but conditions apply” bit to us. We constantly behave in the “but conditions apply” mode while we pretend to be something else. Real-life is a constant Trolley Problem. For the uninitiated the Trolley problem is as follows:
There is a runaway trolley hurtling down a railway track. Somewhere down the line on the tracks, there are five people tied up and they simply cannot move. This trolley is going to go and hit them. Now, this is where you (the individual to whom this problem is presented) come into the picture. You are standing next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will get diverted to another track. But hang on it does not end here. There is one single person who is working on this new track that you can divert the trolley. Now you have two options:
Do nothing and let the trolley go on its original course that will kill the five people on the main track.
Pull the lever; this will divert the trolley onto the 2nd track where it will kill one person.
Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
For some, the death caused by COVID will matter a lot more because they might have lost a member due to it or it is simply because it is something the media discusses all the time. But what we should remember is that as COVID ravages our society there are other people dying daily due to multiple reasons. Our already inadequate healthcare system has gone for an absolute toss. Polio vaccinations have taken a hit, prenatal and postnatal deaths have increased because the entire system is dealing with COVID. Lockdowns create a unique set of problems of their own. At such a time it would augur well for all of us (including the author) to pay attention to the real issues and stop this fetishization of deaths. The fear porn that is being unleashed on a daily basis to scare the citizenry has to stop. It has to be replaced with programs that educate the citizenry about the importance of wearing masks and getting vaccinated.
The Olympics of Death is real. It is all around us, maybe it’s time we understood it and did something to correct it. Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” What he forgot to tell us is that even within those millions there are some that matter more than others.