Empathy
“When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination,
the whole world opens up to you.” -Susan Sarandon
What do you feel when you see the suffering of another? When you see a living being in pain, do you, yourself, feel pain? Or do you discard it because that person is of no relation to you, their problems not affecting your life? Most people have the ability to feel sympathy, a connection through shared suffering, but true compassion lies in developing empathy.
It is easy to see a friend struggling to pay their bills and feel sorry for them because you are going through the same hardship. It is not as easy to feel that same sorrow when you look at a family running from their war torn country, desperately seeking asylum and stability. You do not know how that suffering feels. You have never experienced that level of hardship before and so you must learn to imagine how terrible that would be to experience. How scared you would be for your family. How devastatingly traumatizing it could be to have your home destroyed and your country torn to pieces around you, forcing you to flee through unknown lands in desperate hopes of the kindness of strangers. If you can’t take the time to imagine someone else’s suffering, and internalize their struggle without ever actually walking in their shoes, than you cannot have compassion, and you cannot truly understand the world around you.
What we are seeing on a national scale is a massive lack of empathy. Led by a man who shows every sign of narcissistic personality disorder (a condition that makes one devoid of empathy), this movement seeks to turn us away from the suffering of the other. We are allowing fear and hatred to direct our country and losing everything that makes us human. When you can justify tearing a child away from their parents by saying it is a justifiable deterrent for those seeking asylum or a better life, you are truly lost. I hope you never have to go through the hardship that a refugee, an asylum seeker, or a poor immigrant searching for a better life have to go through, but I truly feel like that might be the only way you could see how horrific it could be to experience that, and then to have your children taken away as punishment for daring to try to find a better life.
Whether it be for the refugee, scared and desperate, begging for mercy. The homeless veteran with mental health issues, cold and hungry on the street. The single mother, working like a slave to survive yet spat on as a leech. The disabled laborer, fighting for dignity. Or any other number of suffering souls facing battles you may never even witness, you must learn how to imagine ones pain, internalize ones struggle, and understand their plight, if you ever want a world in which the same would be done for you in your time of need.
A world without empathy is a world at war with itself.
A person without empathy is blind.
Open you eyes, heal this world.
I believe we are all empathetic, but life brainwashes some of us not to feel.
Some individuals are genetically incapable of empathy, ie. sociopaths. Fortunately they are few and far between, and yet, they are the ones at the top of the pyramid in nearly any given society, for they do not hesitate to hurt anyone or anything to meet their goals. I often wonder where we would be as a society without those seldom few people that drive the species forward, whether we like it or not, to sometimes grander, sometimes more horrific states of being. Would society merely stagnate with too much empathy? I think we would be better off in a state of stagnation if the present world of sociopathic leaders is any indication of the road they are leading us down, but who knows? I for one like to believe that empathy is the only reason we have gotten so far as a species, but others would say it was the sociopathic drive of the few at the top that got us this far. Maybe it’s both?
Hmmmm…..I don’t know, that’s for sure. But I choose empathy regardless. That choice may very well be folly, but if we’re all going to die no matter what anyway, I’d rather live in folly than excel in selfish solitude. Ultimatley, that is a preference, and likely a statement on my upbringing and lack of socipathic genes. To the sociopath I am a fool. To the sociopath, my empathy is a gaping wound festering and infecting my body. How interesting that such starkly different views can persist within the same species. Such is the way, I suppose.
Some individuals are genetically incapable of empathy, ie. sociopaths. Fortunately they are few and far between, and yet, they are the ones at the top of the pyramid in nearly any given society, for they do not hesitate to hurt anyone or anything to meet their goals. I often wonder where we would be as a society without those seldom few people that drive the species forward, whether we like it or not, to sometimes grander, sometimes more horrific states of being. Would society merely stagnate with too much empathy? I think we would be better off in a state of stagnation if the present world of sociopathic leaders is any indication of the road they are leading us down, but who knows? I for one like to believe that empathy is the only reason we have gotten so far as a species, but others would say it was the sociopathic drive of the few at the top that got us this far. Maybe it’s both?
Hmmmm…..I don’t know, that’s for sure. But I choose empathy regardless. That choice may very well be folly, but if we’re all going to die no matter what anyway, I’d rather live in folly than excel in selfish solitude. Ultimatley, that is a preference, and likely a statement on my upbringing and lack of socipathic genes. To the sociopath I am a fool. To the sociopath, my empathy is a gaping wound festering and infecting my body. How interesting that such starkly different views can persist within the same species. Such is the way, I suppose.