Happy Tuesday everyone! Stephen’s post was delayed, but we have it today! Thank you so much, Stephen. We really appreciate it!
Empathy: the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/empathy Not a very satisfying definition for my tastes, let us see what other definitions the interwebs have to offer.
Empathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy
That’s a bit better, except for that annoyingly vague last bit.
We, as a society, are told repeatedly by the leftist in the media and academia that the core of what makes a decent person is the ability to have empathy for one’s fellow man, a quality which every leftist is made to believe that they hold in spades, making them just better people than those callous, unfeeling cretins on the right.
We are all familiar with how this plays out. In the issue of abortion, conservatives have no empathy for the woman; in climate change, they have no empathy for future generations; in welfare, no empathy for the poor; in social security, no empathy for the elderly; in health care, no empathy for the sick; in education, no empathy for the children, and in immigration, no empathy for criminal aliens.
However, let us take a closer look at those actual definitions. Is empathy really “sharing someone else’s feelings or experiences”? No, that same definition then states that it is an act of imagination of what it might be like, which means that the feelings are not shared, but your imagination projected upon another person.
Can anyone ever really “vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another”? Or is it, as the definition actually begins to say, an action of understanding of the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of another?
Is empathy an emotive action or is it a cognitive action? Most people really have not thought about this and just have a vague notion of this concept, but that will certainly not suffice when the concept itself becomes used as a political weapon upon the battlefield of public discourse.
In the field of illegal immigration, poverty stricken foreigners are enticed by lax law enforcement and lured in with promises of massive public handouts to breach the laws of other nations, to be subjected to sometimes confinement, makeshift housing, arduous travel, life threatening risks, unhealthy hygiene, and opportunistic human predators.
What is the purpose of this? Why just to make a public spectacle of the created misery to employ as a political weapon against those who would oppose illegal immigration as not having sufficient empathy for those suffering as the result of these self-imposed conditions in response to those very enticements.
A very expensive photo-op in terms of human misery.
However, we are told that to not desire this human misery in the first place is to lack emotional pangs of compassion for the wretches who become plastered upon our television monitors, newspapers, and internet feeds. Is that emotional hand-wringing really what one can properly call “empathy”, or is it really a cynical exploitation of induced misery to create a political cudgel?
Let me propose the notion that it is not the emotional response which is true empathy, but rather the intellectual understanding of how people will respond to such enticements and lures, with a view to their past, present, and future situations and the consequences reasonably expected from the actions so encouraged.
Empathy of an intellectual nature requires more from humanity than feelings, but understanding the consequences of the decisions of actions and policies, how not merely some people’s behaviors may be effected but how culture itself will proceed and be moved over time with the adoption of a new ethos.
Many of the effects of political policies are like a snowball rolling downhill, the effects in the beginning being barely noticeable, but over time accumulating greater mass and power. People want instant change, but the full effects of a political change may take generations to fully understand and comprehend through observation what a man with intellectual reason can see beforehand.
Is it empathy to give out welfare to single mothers who find themselves in an unfortunate predicament; or is it empathy to realize that by creating a system of governmental support will lead to the breakup of the family with the instances of such predicaments tripling or more?
Leftist claim that they empathize with others, but their actions do not show the slightest instances of empathy. Reporter Andy Ngo was attacked by leftist thugs, but no one on the left appeared to have the slightest sharing of his feelings. They routinely call people names like “racist”, “bigot”, “sexist”, “homophobe”, “nazi”, et cetera, but never once express empathy for those whom they are calling names.
When the more idiotic activists on the left pretend they are cattle and are actually searing their own flesh with brands and being led by collars into cramped pens to share the experience with the animals so that they can empathize, and to try to get you to empathize, does this self-flagellation really increase anyone’s understanding?
The conservative watching these antics just think they are idiots, and the idiots participating have no empathy for those meat-eaters they are trying to politically convince. (I am assuming that they not trying to convince the cattle to stop being cattle by such inane actions.)
If your definition of “empathy” does not increase understanding, then it is useless. The emotive definition of empathy is at best a lame attempt at projection, not understanding.
If I were deathly ill with a potentially fatal disease and some government gave me healthcare I’d feel . . . well, nothing. They were required by law to do so. There is no emotional response required on my part, so why waste the energy?
The same is true for those who foolishly expect “refugees” to be grateful for being admitted to America and Europe from places like Somalia or Pakistan. Those nations were required by their own laws to admit them, so what is there to merit gratitude?
Really, the projection of emotion onto others in the fraudulent name of empathy is often misplaced and erroneous. How you think another person might feel or think, may or may not be correct. It is even less likely to be correct if you are merely projecting your own emotions without the intellectual understanding of the culture, beliefs, understandings, alternatives, and thought processes available to those others.
To think that other people think like you think is not empathy, it is foolish and narcissistic.
To actually understand how another person is likely to feel does not require you to actually feel the same thing. That’s a hard concept for some people to grasp. I do not need to actually feel fear, or a projection of fear, to understand that another person might feel fear in a given situation. Understanding is a thought, not an emotion.
It is a logical, and self-flattering, fallacy to think that because a person has not experienced something that they lack the intellectual capacity to understand what that experience is like. It would be as easy to say that a person who has experienced something has been biased by their own personal experience therefor their opinion is invalid because of their experience.
True empathy requires one not to think how another person might feel, but to understand how a person might react, and to evaluate whether that reaction itself is beneficial or harmful. We are not here to follow other people on their emotional roller-coaster rides, to descend into madness with them because we imagine how they feel and think, but to understand why they feel and think that way.
While empathy may require one to understand another’s subjective perspective, it cannot reasonably detach the observer from their own objective evaluations of the likely consequences of relevant behaviors. Empathy must then be an intellectual exercise of reason, an application of understanding how the world works, and how other people think, feel, and act. Empathy is a form of reason.
