The Universal Symbol for Empathy
Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.
―
In recent weeks, the absolutely normal and not-strange-at-all Elon Musk has waxed poet on the subject of empathy. Or to be more accurate, how empathy should be avoided at all costs since, as he put it in a February interview, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
He has also referred to those who rely on government programs in any way as the “Parasite Class.” You know, the Parasite Class— poor folks on Food Stamps, old folks in nursing homes, people who have lost everything they owned to natural disasters, retirees who depend on the Social Security to which they contributed for their entire lives, farmers who depend on subsidies, veterans who depend on the healthcare and other support they were promised, and so on.
Let’s not forget to include those corporations and those billionaires who greatly profit from huge government subsidies or have built their wealth by exploiting government funded research and development.
He may be right– there may be a parasite class. It’s just might not be the same one he’s pointing at. It’s exploitation for thee, but not for me.
I’ve written a number of times over the years about the declining level of empathy in this country. There was a University of Michigan study from 2009 that spanned thirty years which measured the empathy levels of 14,000 college students over that time frame. It concluded that there was a steep decline from 1979 to 2009 in the levels of empathy among the students surveyed. They surmised that the college student of 2009 was 40% less empathetic than those in 1979. I take the results of this study with a grain of salt since I can’t vouch for its validity, accuracy, or level of bias of its methodology. But even if it is off by a factor of 50%, the results are still troubling.
I thought I’d share another post on empathy that ran a few years back during the week of Thanksgiving. It includes a quote that has been making the rounds in recent months from a psychologist who interviewed and dealt with Nazi war criminals at Spandau Prison in the aftermath of WWII. His conclusions and opinions on empathy differ greatly from those of Musk.
As do my own. Empathy is not the great weakness of Western Civilization. No, it is unbridled greed that is our weakness. Empathy, in my opinion, might be our greatest strength. It is the thing that binds us together as a people, that makes us raise our voices and march in the streets for those other than ourselves who suffer.
Empathy is the driving force of democracy, equality, fairness, and justice.
Okay, I’m climbing off my soapbox now. Here’s that short post on empathy from a few years back:
Let’s continue this Thanksgiving week’s stream of virtues with a biggie: empathy. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes or see through their eyes. To feel their emotions, to try to perceive the circumstances of their life.
As Walt Whitman put it in the immortal Song of Myself, describing his time as a hospital aide during the Civil War when he nursed severely wounded Union soldiers:
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.
It seems like a simple thing, a natural reaction for most decent people. But it is, unfortunately, becoming a more and more scarce entity. It sometimes feels like there is a total absence of empathy in this world with some folks. Or maybe it’s that they have managed to lop their empathy into smaller bits, reserving it only for people who look and speak and think like themselves.
Empathy is sometimes even mocked these days, derided as a symptom of weakness or softness, something to be exploited. My persona view on this is that empathy is actually a strength, something that allows you to feel compassion with those in need while at the same time giving you the ability to understand and perhaps predict how your adversaries might act.
In this case, a lack of empathy is actually a hinderance to those with less than honorable intentions. This thought takes me back to the words of Gustav Gilbert who was the psychologist at Spandau Prison where the Nazi war crimes defendants were held in 1945:
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
Conversely, goodness would include the presence of empathy.
Most of you out there reading this are empathetic folks. If not, you most likely wouldn’t have read this far or be following this blog. So, this is just preaching to the choir. But can you make others feel empathy or, at least, more empathetic to a wider range of others?
I would guess that this can only occur through a willingness to display your own empathy with patience and grace. Much like the words of advice at the top from George Washington Carver.
Do I know this for sure?
No. But who or what can it hurt?
It can only help in some way or another. Try it…
Redtree Times 