In 1947, the German writer and satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote a line that would later be mistakenly attributed to Joseph Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of hundreds of thousands is a statistic.”
The exact authorship may be uncertain, but the message remains brutally clear. In an age of mass conflict and overwhelming numbers, individual suffering dissolves into data. What was once a story with a name and a face becomes just another figure in a report, another headline that fades away.
Today, as the deaths of wars or humanitarian crises are condensed into percentages and interactive charts, the warning behind that phrase feels more urgent than ever: the larger the numbers grow, the less we seem to feel.
The idea behind it is that our capacity for empathy has limits. When we hear about a single person’s pain – their face, their name, their story – it’s tangible and we feel it deeply. But when suffering becomes large-scale, like millions dying in war or hundreds being dislocated from their countries, our emotional response dulls. The numbers become abstract, and the horror turns into something our minds can’t fully grasp. It’s what turned to be later called narcotizing dysfunction of mass media, a concept developed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton in The Communication of Ideas (1948), sheds light on this. According to them, the overabundance of information often produces only a superficial concern for social issues, masking a deeper apathy. The tendency for compassion to fade as the number of victims grows.
If Stalin did say it, it would fit his manipulative understanding of human psychology. As a totalitarian leader, he ruled through fear and control, and he knew how to exploit public perception. In a way, the phrase encapsulates how regimes like his could commit atrocities while maintaining social order: individual tragedies were buried in statistics, reports, and propaganda.
It’s also a stark reminder of how storytelling and communication matter. Journalists, activists, and humanitarian workers often try to personalize massive crises for exactly this reason, because people act when they can connect emotionally with a single human story, not when they’re confronted with incomprehensible numbers.
This emotional distance is not just a psychological phenomenon, but a powerful force that shapes, and sometimes erodes, the foundations of democracy. When societies start to see suffering as distant or impersonal, democracy begins to lose its substance. Democracies don’t collapse overnight, they slowly hollow out from within.
At their core, democratic systems depend on mutual recognition – the belief that every voice and every life carry equal dignity. Yet in a world where globalization defines our reality, and where crises seem to multiply on every screen, the constant influx of immigrants and refugees can expose deep divisions. It reinforces the idea of an “inside” and an “outside,” separating citizens from refugees, locals from immigrants, and building invisible walls of emotional detachment and indifference.
Once people are seen only as numbers or threats, it becomes easier to justify exclusion, neglect, or even hostility. Policies that would once have seemed unthinkable – mass deportations, closed borders, withholding aid – start to appear reasonable.
Research confirms what intuition already suggests: empathy matters. The Swedish psychologist Marta Miklikowska demonstrated empirically that “empathy reflects individuals’ need for concern about others, which might resonate with democratic ideals,” concluding that “empathy explained a greater proportion of variance in support for democratic values than many established variables.” Mutually, she found that “as long as right-wing authoritarianism and psychological inflexibility are common, and empathy and interpersonal trust are low, democratic commitments are likely to be weak.” Put simply, how much we care about others shapes how we engage with society.
So, if empathy is that vital to the health of democracy, the question becomes: how do we cultivate it in a world where large-scale crises often reduce human suffering to statistics? One powerful answer can lie in direct engagement: in volunteering.
Volunteering is an act of will; it is empathy in action.
It is a conscious choice to dedicate time and energy without expecting financial reward, to engage directly with something larger than yourself, to witness and act rather than remain distant. When that work involves refugees, it doesn’t instantly convey the full reality of leaving one’s home or family behind. But it does allow us to humanize what would otherwise remain abstract numbers and headlines. Their dreams and fear are no less significant than our own; their lives cannot be reduced to public costs. Every story matters because every life matters.
From a political perspective, volunteering is a form of active citizenship. It’s an opportunity to redefine citizenship itself, expanding it to include empathy, solidarity, and collective responsibility. Particularly in contexts involving migration and displacement, volunteering transcends individual altruism and becomes a political act, one that challenges exclusionary narratives and helps build broader, shared identities.
By engaging directly with others’ lives and stories, we take part in what the academic Emily Apter calls the micro-phenomenology of political life: an analytical approach that highlights the significance of “quiet” or “unexceptional” forms of politics in contemporary societies. It draws attention to how everyday acts of compassion and care function as concrete embodiments of social change. In other words, it studies politics not only through institutions or large-scale events but also through the small, ordinary interactions that shape how people live together and make sense of political belonging.
In this sense, every act of connection is political, an alternative political subjectivity that understands politics from the ground up, capturing the subtle and often overlooked dimensions through which democratic life is sustained. This perspective is especially important in contemporary democracies, where much political engagement happens outside formal institutions and instead unfolds through affective, relational, and embodied practices.
If the twentieth century revealed how readily human lives can be subsumed within statistics, the twenty-first offers an opportunity to invert that logic. When we fail to recognize others as fully human, we risk building societies that justify exclusion, neglect, and indifference – invisible walls that erode trust and collective responsibility. Political life does not occur only in spectacular moments but also in the slow, ongoing gestures that collectively shape public culture and democratic capacities: everyday encounters as political.