The Problem with Scale and Strangers in story telling

It is not wild to say that it is challenging to feel things for people we don’t know; that’s why we get hurt more when someone we trusted betrayed us than someone we just met.

But human beings are terrible on large or small scales. We can’t comprehend things such as atoms or galaxy clusters and sink into how these things are small or big. We need reference upscaling or downscaling to give them forms and shapes, simplifying all the complexity of what they are. We know about them and how they work, but we streamline and transform their reactions into numbers or facts. We know, of course, that’s why people spend their entire lives trying to comprehend more about them.

Now that we establish how bad we are at scale, let’s talk about people; if someone asks you to picture people in your head, how many can you make before they lose individuality, then how many can you imagine with certainty that the exact number of people, then go beyond imagine a place that you know can hold thousands of people like a stadium, now with that when you did you imagine people as persons, or as part the scenography now imagine an entire city filled with people if you can, I can bet people become spots at this point.

If you think about it now, it is easier for us to say maybe 1 million people. We can’t put faces, but we can understand the number. But let’s go back to the scenario now that the city is erased from the map in an instant 1 million people died in a second. How do you feel? Many would say sad, maybe shocked no one you knew lives there, but we can all agree it’s a catastrophe. How bad do you feel? Now imagine days later, the disfigured remains begging to appear, and you take a look into one of the victims. You feel worse than you did before most do. But you would continue your life, now it is discovered this was the doing of one man, a mad scientist you don’t know, but his picture is all over the news. How do you feel towards them? Now let's say in this reality, one day, this scientist goes missing, and by chance, he kidnaps you and the person you love the most. He dissects using the same technology he used in the city. Your loved one dies in an instant, disappears for a couple of seconds, and then his disfigured body drops in front of you; how do you feel about the scientist now? Do you hate him more? Most probably would; although you know what he did to the city was objectively worse, you would probably hate him more than ever. You would be in grief and intense hate.

Let’s stop there. The truth of the matter is that for the majority, when the city was destroyed, all those people were just a large number in your head, just a thought in your head, but if you described the other, many would say I was telling a nightmare-like event. This may happen over a more prominent period when people become numbers. We stripped them of their humanity to simplify the scale, and that’s how people become a statistic, a fraction of something we can understand. We forget this was a nightmare for those close enough to experience the event.

Now, this is so sadistic, but writers know this. That’s why when a villain can destroy entire cities, he hates them less than one, hurting one of our main characters in front of the readers. Think about the bad guys you hate the most and what makes you hate them; you will be surprised by how true this is.