Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 22: The Empathy Mirror – Leveraging the power of protected relatability

Wherever a fellow human being exists, there lies not only a chance for kindness, but also for empathy – which, in the face of misfortune, takes the form of pity.

Yet the intensity of this emotion does not always mirror the depth of suffering. The cause resides in the cunning craft of information warriors – masters of the politics of empathy – most potent when paired with targeted contextual leverage. This elite squad deftly manipulates the levers of pity – captured in the “Political Pity Equation” (or “Political Pity Formula”) – to summon potent emotional responses that serve its ends.

The framework comprises views of suffering as unjust, abrupt, and severe – along with two further catalysts: felt likeness to the victims and sensed proximity to their plight. All five factors are matters of perception, not fact – a propagandist’s dream, for they can be bent at will, letting spin doctors fine-tune public pity like a thermostat.

1. Protected relatability: Connection at a safe remove

Functioning as an empathy mirror, “protected relatability” (or “shielded relatability”) is the bond forged by similarity of person and fate, yet held at a safe, glassbound distance. It is empathy behind armor, invulnerable: Think of watching patients battling deadly viruses through unbreakable glass: close enough to feel their pain, yet shielded from the invisible threat they carry – a knife-edge balance of connection without exposure, compassion without contagion. Connection, in this form, survives, sterilized by separation.

Relatability, a quiet, yet potent force, is fragile, precariously hinging on the proper dose and delicate balance of personal and situational affinity; tip the scales, and another emotion is evoked. To unlock the mysterious alchemy of pity, its workings in what follows are traced across three turbulent theatres of the information wars: Ukraine, Gaza, and Russia. Suffering there becomes battlefield ordnance: weaponized, detonated, or withheld on cue to sway hearts.

Resemblance

To feel pity is to experience yourself in another’s suffering, yet at proximity that never bridges. In practice, the sense of moderate personal resemblance critically depends on information management.

Point in case: Western public pity for Ukrainians did not arise spontaneously and organically in a vacuum: it was meticulously crafted by leaders engaging in empathy politics at targeted narrative flashpoints – image by image, word by word (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

From the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO), political communicators worked swiftly to frame Ukrainians as reflections of traditional Western audiences: white, European, urban, and often Christian.

Ukrainians were shown wearing the same brands, using the same gadgets, and speaking in terms of democracy and freedom just like their Western peers. News footage showed middle-class families in jeans and sneakers fleeing war-torn suburbs, students with tablets huddled in subway shelters – children clutched smartphones, not stones.

When a defiant Ukrainian refugee appeared on screen wearing a North Face jacket and cradling a pet, the resemblance to the audience’s own traits and preferences was uncanny. The image of a piano-playing boy in a Kiev basement or a grandmother waving a Ukrainian flag outside her bombed home activated instinctive kinship. Political rhetoric emphasized shared values, casting Ukraine as the moral twin of the West – modern, aspirational, and aligned with liberal democratic norms.

All of this was not just accidental storytelling and casual taglining – it was strategic messaging and calculated priming, aimed at evoking familiarity. Through curated imagery, speeches, and headlines – repeated across a multitude of influential platforms – information warriors in Western governments and media created sturdy emotional bridges, making it emotionally and morally intuitive for Western audiences to identify with Ukrainian victims.

Western spin doctors cast Ukrainians as “people like us”, triggering the visceral “It could be me” effect, safely buffered by distance. Shared identity and morality did not just invite pity, it ensured it – and with it, enduring public support. Thomas Merton was right, “Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.”

Gaza tells a different story. In this case, Western narrative architects erase personal likeness, blocking the pity that resemblance invites. Palestinians are framed not as people, but as threats. With journalists barred and stories filtered through military briefings, Gazans remained outside the emotional circle.

Dehumanization is not a side effect, it is the very lens that makes Palestinian suffering, if shown, bearable. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant branded Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals” while imposing a total siege – cutting water, food, medicine, electricity, and fuel. Critics condemn such labels as genocidal rhetoric.

In Gaza, the world sees dust and militants, not mothers and children. Selective imagery and echoes – veils, rubble, chants – code Palestinians as the “other” in the mental landscape of Westerners. Faces dissolve into smoke and ruin; names vanish into cold statistics labeled “collateral damage.” A starving child in Rafah is not seen as a mirror of a Western child on the school run, but as a distant tragedy safely walled off from shared humanity.

With media access tightly controlled, few intimate glimpses of Gazans reach Western audiences – and when they do, they are often framed by association with Hamas and violence.

With Israeli narratives dominating international headlines, Gazans appear not as relatable individuals, but as bit-part players caught in a recurring conflict. They are not recognized as people like “us”, but as problems. The resulting apathy is not accidental – it is cultivated detachment – without similarity, empathy dies.

In stark contrast, Israeli hostages are rendered painfully, vividly human. Soldiers or not, they are portrayed as familiar – Western in name and manner. Their stories unfold through family photos, heartfelt interviews, and candlelight vigils. Western leaders speak their names, giving their suffering a face and voice. Their families receive visibility and airtime; Gazan families are reduced to statistics. It easy to imagine Israelis as reflections of ourselves. That is the point.

Like Gaza, Russia is cast through a lens of difference – its portrayal shaped in contrast to an idealized Ukraine, the quintessential Anti-Russia, each sharpening the other’s outline. Building on decades of cultural distancing that cast Russians as inherently alien – a deliberate, grotesque campaign of pervasive long-term brand erosion – Western political engineers have, post-SMO, meticulously remade Russians into the ultimate “other”: cold, complicit, and cursed. Through recurring curated media frames of stern faces, militarized imagery, and Kremlin symbolism, Russians are transformed into shadows of an authoritarian regime, not recognizable individuals.

This calculated “othering” strips away relatable features – everyday joys, universal fears – making it difficult for Western audiences to see Russians as people like themselves. A wounded civilian in a drone-hit border town or a conscript’s grieving mother deep in the heart of Russia – if shown at all – rarely stirs compassion abroad, not for lack of suffering, but because Western audiences see no reflection of themselves. Stripped of everyday humanity and cloaked in suspicion – deemed disposable and beyond redemption – Russians feel foreign, their warped portrayal deadening the instinct to empathize. In this meticulously engineered divide, they lose their place among “people like us,” and with it, the world’s pity.

Closeness

Apart from glassbound personal resemblance, the alchemy of pity requires another ingredient of protected relatability: moderate situational closeness – parallel fates, aligned but never touching. Crucially, the suffering must feel spatially, temporally, and culturally close enough to touch – urgent and immediate – but distant enough not to alarm.

The ordeal of Ukrainians occupies that emotional sweet spot where pity thrives: close enough in geography, time, and customs to feel human, yet distant enough to spare discomfort. Kiev’s shattered apartment blocks and Metro stations transformed into bomb shelters echo London or Berlin, familiar but safely removed. This tempered, moderate proximity triggers an empathetic reflex: near enough to relate, far enough to watch without fear – after all, few in the West expect an imminent Russian strike on NATO soil. It is a textbook case of the modified “it could be me, but likely won’t” effect, reinforced by political speechwriters, media strategists, and editorial boards across the collective West – paralleled fates, perfectly aligned, divided by a tempered, bulletproof pane.

Proximity exposes pity’s fragility. Should political messaging recast the Ukraine war as a prelude to a likely Russian attack on NATO, collective compassion may yield to personal fear, and altruistic support risks crumbling into self-interest.

In contrast to Ukraine, pain in Gaza lingers on the far edge of Western emotional reach – made unrelatable, unfolding in silence. Political narratives have long associated Palestinians with distance, danger and moral ambiguity rather than shared humanity. People there suffer behind thick walls – physical, political, affective – built and reinforced by a system designed to keep their pain from feeling like one’s very own. Without perceived common ground, emotional identification falters, making it impossible to internalize their suffering. In this way, political and media systems engineer a distance that blunts compassion – not by denying suffering, but by making it feel alien.

Though the devastation is immense – besieged or flattened neighborhoods, displaced communities, slain children mourned by their parents – the remoteness is not just geographic but experiential. Gaza is often portrayed through grainy images or abstract casualty counts; starvation is sanitized as “malnutrition.” Israel’s curbs on foreign media further choke emotionally resonant coverage, including stark reports of Israeli soldiers, almost daily, killing several dozens of Palestinians queuing for bread. The restrictions mute the immediacy of Israel’s relentless violence and suppress moments of shared vulnerability.

This curated distance denies viewers the sense that Gazans share identifiable struggles; their suffering becomes remote noise. Add to this the political, ethnic, religious, and cultural distance: Arabic language, Islamic faith, Hamas-related headlines – elements that many Western viewers find unfamiliar or unsettling. The result is emotional detachment. The suffering is too far removed – visually and psychologically – and morally entangled for true pity to take root.

Russia’s suffering, in turn, lands not in the heart but in the crosshairs of political narrative. A select group of information warriors in the collective West push it further from the mainstream than the human catastrophe in Gaza, not by stressing geographic distance, but through strategic – moral and affective – distancing, engineered to justify disengagement.

Sabotage, drone strikes, and funerals for conscripted soldiers are routinely filtered through the lens of suspicion and culpability. Russian towns hit by shelling feel abstract, and stories of civilian deaths are wrapped in narratives of national complicity. The suffering does not reach us raw, but distorted: the imagery lacks the vivid, human detail that brings suffering into the viewer’s emotional orbit, arriving filtered, sanitized, and weighed against guilt.

To the Western gaze, hence, the pain of Russians does not feel close; it registers less as human tragedy and more as geopolitical fallout – data to parse, not grief to share. With suffering inviting debate, not empathy – pain calculated, not felt – the Russian experience remains foreign: distant in sympathy, held outside the circle of moral concern to keep pity at bay.

2. The science of empathy management: Calibrating pity with laser precision

Experts in psychological warfare treat pity less as instinct than as design – a controlled response, raised or reduced in an instant, with pinpoint accuracy.

Gaza shows how neatly, and precisely, moral shock and outrage can be tuned to amplify or dampen pity. First, the collective West let Israeli forces – armed by its factories, shielded by its diplomats – complete the principal stages of havoc in the shadow of global empathy. Then, pity was abruptly dialed up, conceivably to sedate restless Muslim electorates and reclaim moral authority.

This tentative, perhaps fleeting emotional recalibration – which critics may dismiss as opportunistic, short-lived tokenism in lieu of an urgently needed paradigm shift – paved the way for select G7 nations’ nods to Palestinian statehood. A potent illustration of the tradeoffs in prompting pity: The modulation of rhetoric chipped away at Israel’s eternal-victim veneer, etching it closer toward diplomatic isolation.

An expert contingent of Western spin doctors, predictably, once again weaponized the all-purpose object of pity: the suffering child, linked to a woman – unashamedly exploiting what critics say they should have exposed on day one of Israel’s Gaza assault. Capitalizing on Israel’s alleged campaign of deliberate mass starvation, a notable instance of contextual leverage, they flashed stark before-and-after images: children healthy, then ravaged by malnutrition.

True to form, an iconic image surfaced, haunting like the Napalm Girl of Vietnam and the drowned Syrian refugee boy: toddler Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, emaciated, swaddled in a rubbish bag, sheltered in his mother’s embrace.

Carrying profound spiritual weight and resonance for Christian hearts, in particular, the picture recalls the poor strips of cloths that wrapped Jesus in the manger (Luke 2:7). The image of the skeletal boy wasting away in his mother’s arms also summons the mater dolorosa in the Pietà (Italian for “pity” or “compassion”) – the Sorrowful Mother cradling her crucified son, immortalized by Michelangelo – an iconic embodiment of pity etched deeply in collective memory (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Another jolt to pity is the revisited searing story of an incident that happened in January 2025: an Israeli soldier exulting after shooting unarmed Palestinian boy Ahmed in the chest, piercing his heart, and reveling in the sight of the child slowly and painfully bleeding to death before his eyes – the boy’s dreams snuffed out with his life.

Blistering headlines like CNN’s belated “Gaza is starving and outrage is spreading. Will Netanyahu listen?” (25 July 2025) or stark, unvarnished alerts patterned on cues such as “More kids will have starved to death by the time you finish this column” exacerbate the emotional sting.

Earlier, bestowing the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year award to the gut-wrenching image of nine-year-old amputee boy Mahmoud Ajjour, maimed in a 2024 Israeli strike on Gaza, served a similar purpose – its momentary spotlight soon eclipsed by deafening radio silence on Gazan suffering.

All this graphic, haunting content struck a raw, visceral chord worldwide by expertly tugging every string of pity. The starving toddler Muhammad Zakariya, in particular, represents a state-of-the art model in this regard: undeserved agony, shocking malnutrition, profound suffering. The little boy also embodies the twin facets of protected relatability – the affinity built on shared traits and parallel fates, buffered by distance – namely: personal resemblance and situational closeness. He faintly reflects the audience’s own children and other cherished young ones, but never fully, while his pain feels urgent, yet safely distanced. It is kinship in silhouette, untouchable: close enough to ache, far enough to breathe.

3. Conclusion: The road towards heartfelt humanity

Albert Camus observed, “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present”. His paradox teaches us that a just future depends on our willingness to engage fully with the present – including the discomfort of confronting real pain concealed by sanitized, spoon-fed narratives that subtly create bias.

True pity hinges on five balanced, interlocking conditions, depending on optimal measure and right distance: the suffering is undeserved, the plight surprising, the harm grave, the victim resembles the observer, and the threat is close enough to move, but not to threaten him – mirrored lives, sealed by distance.

Yet crack teams engaging in political storytelling carefully select whose pain fits these criteria – and whose is excluded. By elevating Ukrainian suffering while reducing Gazan and Russian victims to abstractions, Western narratives shrink the conflicts’ moral frame – obscuring the full human toll and choking universal empathy.

To reclaim shared, heartfelt humanity and honor all those who suffer rather than just a chosen few, we must cast off convenient scripts and confront the full, tangled reality of war’s tragedy. In Ukraine, Gaza, and Russia, only by embracing the full, complex human nature of all victims and their unvarnished plight – no matter how inconvenient and unsettling – can our pity be authentic and our compassion truly be free. Only then can pity eschew manipulation and become the radical generosity Camus envisioned – a gift given now, for a more truthful, more humane future.

[Part 3 of a trilogy on the politics of selective pity. Previous columns in the series: Part 1, published on 26 July 2025: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 20: The Political Pity Equation – Who deserves our tears? & Part 2, published on 28 July 2025: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 21: Pity picks sides – Ukraine mourned, Gaza shadowed, Russia blamed]