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Dec 7, 2019

Why I'm Tired of Hearing About Empathy

There are few things more omnipresent in modern culture than calls for empathy.  It is everywhere, as if it were the panacea of the modern age.  Empathy is held up as a cure for social problems, family problems, health problems, environmental problems, energy problems, the list is virtually endless.  Whenever someone does something unspeakable, the cause is always construed as a lack of empathy.  Whenever someone does something virtuous, they're praised for their empathy.  It's long past the point of bromide and is edging on toward banality.

And, like all quack nostrums and cure-alls, it doesn't do what is promised.  Not even close.

Before I get in to the reasons why I'm fed up with empathy, I'm going to tell you a little bit about me, but in return I want you to do something.  I want you read this and NOT empathize.  Don't even try, in fact, try as hard as you can NOT to empathize, just read the words like you're studying some detached facts about a distant stranger.  If you prize empathy, you're going to find this difficult, but it's important that you at least try, because while this story is important context it is not the point, and if you can't turn your empathy off for five minutes you're going to miss that point completely.  Here we go.

My entire life has been hideously colored by a bad case of emotions gone wrong, of chronic depression, anxiety, self-loathing, dread, and self-inflicted misery.  I consider it to be a very good week, indeed, if I make it through without thinking about the best way to commit suicide, and all the very many ways that I'm constantly letting people down.  I struggle to find a reason--not reasons, mind you, a, singular, reason--to care about whether I'm alive tomorrow or not.  I'm currently dealing with serious swelling and infection in my leg that I've had now for over a year.  Everyone I know yells at me to go see a doctor, but I haven't yet managed to get so far as making an appointment.  I've been like this since I was eleven, possibly long before that.  I've never been a happy person.  Mostly, I'm uncomfortable, frustrated, impatient, incredulous, or downright enraged.  I hate how slow, stupid, awkward, and incapable I am at every moment of every day. 

When I was eleven, I saw a movie about the end of the world called The Seventh Sign. It wasn't a particularly memorable movie, but something about that concept of the world ending lodged in my mind.  It sat there, a solid mass, like a black hole so dense that not even light could escape.  And it proceeded to eat my life.  The cobbled-together elements of my identity, my interests, loves, motivation, goals, all vanished, never to be seen again.  I became a scavenger picking through wreckage, struggling to hold together against a relentless pull.

Yeah, it was bad.  Still is, in a lot of ways.  I learned to cope, but the way I learned to cope involved a lot of bad habits that I now also have to fight.  But I also learned something else that's relevant here--I learned that one of the worst things I had to endure wasn't my own personal black hole. It was other people's empathy.

Empathy is no panacea.  It's not a cure for anything, much less everything.  It's just a feeling--the feeling that you're sharing in what I'm feeling.  It's an emotional reaction, and like all emotional reactions it can be a terrible, terrible, liar, but because everyone and everything around you is telling you it's a good thing to feel, you don't judge it.  You don't think about it.  You just wallow in it.  Empathy allows people to indulge in the most useless, self-indulgent, and non-productive emotions and feel good about themselves for doing so.  It's not helpful; it's self-centered.  It doesn't make you more conscious of other people.  It makes you oblivious to them, for the simple reason that you CAN'T feel their emotions.  The only way to truly understand another person's problems is intellectually, not emotionally--to engage your brain, not your feels.  I can sit here and describe my emotional struggles until the end of time, but you will never actually feel what I feel.  I don't want you to feel what I feel, heck, I don't want to feel it, myself!  It's terrible, it's not productive, it's a black hole.  I don't need you in here with me.  I need you out there, with some clarity, some perspective, some distance.

Empathy has its place, but that place is at the age of three or so when your mother is trying to get you to stop hitting your sister.  Children that age are just starting to understand the difference between themselves and other people, who are not yet fully real to them.  Empathy relates the reactions of others back to the child in a way that the child can grasp--by drawing on the self as a model.  It is the beginning, not the end, of social development, a starting point where you can gather information that is later used as a foundation for abstraction.  Without abstraction, you're stuck with only the concrete of the moment.  Only as much information as you can fit into your attention at one time.  As Joseph Stalin famously stated it, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic."  No one can deal emotionally, from empathy, with a million deaths, any more than you can mentally picture ten thousand miles or a billion stars.  It blows out every human faculty but one--the intellectual faculty.

This cultural obsession with empathy is a case of arrested development, where people focus on one concrete after another but are absolutely helpless to deal with complex abstractions.  It's a world where virtue (an enormous abstraction) is increasingly being replaced with virtue-signaling (a concrete).  It is, weirdly, increasingly a world where people gush about how much they feel for others and care for others while simultaneously being unable to truly grasp how others might truly be completely different.  A world that celebrates every kind of "diversity" except one, the one that makes us truly human--diversity of thought.

It's time to stop wallowing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So wow.

I've always felt a large disconnect from how other people experience empathy, and myself. Some of this is the all encompassing fight against the typical mind fallacy, while much of the rest is from this almost mystical approach spouted by self help gurus, high minded business consultants, almost anyone pleading for special circumstances.

Your approach highlights the aspect I've always been uncomfortable with but unable to identify, by trying to fight against the idea while still embracing the same mind set: the mind set that the emotional and logical are, and must always be, completely separate.

For me, I find empathy to be one of my most powerful logical tools. To take an emotions, use it to latch onto a situation, and trace it back to the root causes, you can then plot it forward like a trajectory to guess thought patterns, head off actions, and guide someones ideas in a more helpful way (or less helpful, if inclined).

The key is while yes, you have to be able to feel someones situation to do so, you don't have to stay in that position to keep the knowledge. I don't think most people can do that. I am under the impression that most people either feel nothing and just pretend they do, or feel it too strongly and are sucked into it. A middle ground is difficult yes, but not impossible.

Ironically, I have nothing against wanting to approach everything from a emotionless and logical point of view. But I understand it does not always lead to ideal results.