I Feel for You

Empathy, compassion, and "idiot compassion"

Hi Zan, Hi Pa

Volume #31

December 25th, 2024

Dear Readers,

Both of us send our very best wishes to all of you in this season of celebration. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Enjoy anything and everything you celebrate, and may 2025 be a year of health, peace, and joy for all of us.

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HI, ZAN: I recently read an article about Dorothy Thompson, the brave American journalist who spent a lot of time in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s, interviewed him at least once, and was eventually banished from the country. If I remember right, she thought that the dividing line between those Germans she knew who ended up embracing Nazism, and those who didn’t, was the capacity for empathy. I’ve been thinking about empathy a lot lately. Do you have any thoughts on the subject?

HI, PA: What an interesting theory!

I think I disagree slightly with it, though. I would imagine that most of those who embraced Nazism had selective empathy—they probably were empathetic to those they perceived were like them, and not for those they perceived as “other.” After all, empathy is understanding the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another person, and how can you do that if you don’t relate to that other person on some level?

PA: Agreed. I think about this all the time lately, about friends, good people, whom I know to be very empathetic in daily life, but whose political comments, beliefs, and actions so often reflect an attitude that is intolerant or uncaring, the opposite of empathy. I wonder where the line is for them, for all of us. It’s easy to feel empathy for loved ones and friends, much harder to feel empathy for strangers, and harder still to feel empathy for people who either refuse to help themselves or are doing something hurtful.

ZAN: Interesting, especially considering that we as humans seem to aspire to empathy. If you think about it, empathy is at the core of every major religion and belief system—what is the pillar of alms in Islam, the Golden Rule in Christianity, the commandment of “love your fellow as yourself” in Judaism, or the concept of ātmaupamyatā in Hinduism if not empathy?

PA: And Buddhism has the idea of the bodhisattva, the being who leaves the comforts of better realms to take on a human incarnation and lessen the suffering of those on Earth.

But I’d guess only about half of humans aspire to empathy. Millions of people blunt that feeling in themselves, find reasons not to care about anyone else, and end up causing a lot of the suffering the bodhisattvas try to ease.

ZAN: That’s a good point—it’s true that not every human being aspires to empathy, though what I mean is more that most human societies have built empathy into their systems beyond just the individual level. Religion is one example, in addition to some laws, codes of ethics, and even the justice system—that someone’s sentence can be lessened because their crime was the product of abuse, for example, shows empathy that prompts compassion, as does the fact that we label psychopathy and sociopathy (disorders characterized by lack or impairment of empathy) severe mental disorders.

That doesn’t mean that all individuals operating within that system have empathy, but that the greater system itself seems to hold empathy as a core value. Maybe one of the reasons we have adopted this is because empathy challenges our instincts. For much of human history it was essential to our survival to band together with our tribe against other tribes, and we’ve kept the “us vs them” mentality despite our evolution. A lack of empathy is essential for doing another person harm—that used to be an advantage, and now might just be our downfall.

PA: I think about that downfall, even as I try to act in a positive way. We all have our fixations, and one of my primary fixations lately is the lack of empathy for the poor in this country. We’re a fantastically rich nation and yet, according to these statistics, 47 million Americans live in ‘food-insecure households.’ How can that be? It’s like sunbathing on the beach with a beer while someone drowns right offshore. How can we allow that to happen?

ZAN: Some people—in the US especially—seem to have the sentiment that “I’ve had to make it this far on my own, so everyone else should, too.” Like believing that no one should be given food for free because you’ve had to work hard to put food on your own table. To me, it’s similar to hazing, a kind of inverted empathy almost. That putting another person through a tough situation will be in their best interests because you had to go through tough situations yourself to get where you are today. Tough love is helpful in some situations, but the reality is that people rarely start from an even playing field, so how can you dole out tough love to people whose situations are far more difficult than you can wrap your mind around?