The maxim attributed to Stalin that, 'One death is a tragedy, while the many are just statistics'

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The maxim attributed to Stalin that, [paraphrasing]

'One death is a tragedy, while the many are just statistics'

Are our individual and mass psychology so tangibly self-serving in orientation, that any echoing abstractions similar to a proximal manifestation are more a moment for a fetish of emotional dilettantcy than the fury and rage that could and would be for a proximal event?

There have been some events of our lifetimes that have precipitated equivalent reactions to those events that might have occurred to us personally. I think of the deaths of some public figures whose lives had been given by us a significance equivalence to that of a family member.

For people who are anonymous to us, their tragedies become, at best, fetishes of affected emotions to be performed, less for the emotional grief and horror over their loss, than the perfunctory social ritual in accord with the maxim, 'By the grace of providence, there be I'-a fatalistic acknowledgement of our apathetic, resigned impotence to the inevitable randomness of such an abstraction to which we are its vulnerable objects.

Perhaps, that's the reason why people embrace to clutch those close and known to us with such a visceral, emotional investment for their existence. They and their absence, through their permanent loss, becomes our standard for a 'tragedy'. Those anonymous and distant in their estranged,  tenuous attachment to our proximal visceral interests become the metaphorical statistics for which only a moment of pause or a short gasp of disbelief would be our only observance of their demise. Maybe it is the latent acknowledgement that their statistical death is the metaphorical bell that 'tolls for thee' in the inevitable warning of its probability.