Psychic Numbing and the Recent Atrocities in Syria

Photograph above depicts the Civil Defense "White Helmets" team pulling bodies out from under rubble in Kafrowaid village in southern Idlib's countryside in March 2017. CC BY 3.0 Qasioun News Agency.

By Andrew Quist

After seven years of a steadily rising death toll reaching into the hundreds of thousands, the continuing atrocities committed by the Assad regime, such as murdering nearly 300 people in the past three days in Eastern Ghouta, fail to capture our attention. In his column, “The Slaughter in Syria Should Outrage Us. Yet Still We Just Shrug,” Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland writes, “For seven years we have known that a civil war is raining horror on Syria, and we’ve gotten used to it.” Freedland posits that the global community is not moved to act to end the violence in Syria for two reasons: we’ve simply gotten used to the violence, and we don’t know what to do about it.

Although he doesn't name the psychological biases involved, Freedland has correctly identified two elements of the flawed arithmetic of compassion that underlie this indifference to the latest atrocities in Syria. One is psychic numbing, the inability to connect emotionally with large, slowly accumulating death tolls. The other is pseudoinefficacy, the idea that if one cannot identify a way to solve a complex problem, one reverts to inaction.

“But paying attention, making a noise, has value,” Freedland writes. Our governments should pressure Syria’s allies Russia and Iran to reign in the Assad regime and stop targeting civilians. It is not true that there is nothing we can do. Even partial solutions save lives.

You can read Jonathan Freedland’s column here.