A couple of pre-notes:
- Sometimes people are trolling you and have no idea about your political platform, so they make this accusation without any proof. Then it’s “have you reviewed a large portion of my writings (understandable if not). Why do you suggest I think X is acceptable?” (with the follow on of “it is impossible to recite every problem that ever existed every time we want to deal with one of them”)
- If you really do think this person made a mistake or is underinformed, just tell them, “if you are trying to point out incoherence, put your heart at ease, I also believe/condemn X”
Shortest answer: because we only would talk about mass murder from Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Longer answer: because the political discourse is irregular in stimulus and rotation. If someone asks a question, it may not be the most important question, but you still will try to give the answer in order correctly to guide them and foster their political skill.
Functional answer: because if you never talk about a problem that isn’t a top 5 problem, you force people either to accept all other problems, or to use violence to solve them, since they never will be able to access a forum for redress.
More systematic answer: because if we were to judge our choice of topics and responses by the relative importance at all times, we never would talk about anything but the top 5 problems. However, people can help you (and you can help them) solve problems that are not the top 5 problems, if you give time to them. Furthermore, once you talk about the top 5 problems, eventually you reach educational saturation. At that point there may be ways you can fix people when you cannot fix their responses in relation to the top 5 problems.
There is a valid point about small problems and not talking about larger problems instead. This is the analogue of not having the national government try to solve every problem because there physically isn’t enough time to debate the relevant laws. However you may still talk about small problems when:
- The forum is appropriate (e.g. talking about educational issues when you are before the board of education or local funding authority)
- When there is a very favorable cost/benefit ratio (can you stop doing X that annoys me)
- When you are trying to lower their perceived severity of the issue (to a more correct level) and get people to focus on bigger problems, issues, or facts by partially or completely addressing their concern
- When there is a larger concept or educational value. Essentially using this problem as a enhancer of understanding
- Making use of/helping people, who are not in the position to work on the top 5 problems (with a very favorable cost/benefit ratio)
As for the related case of emotion:
Shortest answer: because if I felt emotion in accordance to current global tragedy I would be crying, stressed, and angry all the time. Hence I’d kill myself with that level of emotional exertion; so if I can choose my emotions, I would want to choose more neutral ones.
Longer answer: because it is not even practical or desirable to feel emotion in many important cases. Consider the police officer: do you want him crying or getting angry when he’s dealing with armed and dangerous criminals, or suicidal people?
More systematic answer: because emotion is not necessarily a reflection of caring or importance. Furthermore, in many situations, such as police work or in education such as a conversation between citizens, having strong emotion can make it more difficult to achieve the objective. Also, because of the number of tragedies and issues, most of the time you never actually would feel a relative emotion anyway. Think about it: if thousands of people are getting murdered every day, what issue are you going to put beside this that should merit any significant amount of relative emotion? Once you get beyond the top 5 or 10, your scale down will reduce any further proportional emotional expression to insignificant amounts.