A World Lacking in Empathy

Empathy is the ability to see things from the perspective of others. It's a rare ability relative to sympathy or antipathy which are merely reflections of sentiments, because most people feel more than they think.

This is regrettable, because a lack of empathy is at the root of much confusion. For instance, most people sympathise with the poor, and want the government to help these by giving them subsidies. Then, the same people get all confused when they see the poor spend their money on tattoos, bling and booze.

There's also much antipathy against the rich and well to do. Many want the government to force them to pay extra taxes so that the government can hand more money out to the poor and other people who they feel are more deserving. Then they get all confused and angry when the rich take actions to avoid the higher taxes.

The fact that so many people get confused, saddened and angry when they see how things play out in reality is proof that empathy is in short supply, because even a small bit of empathy would make clear the inevitable result of redistribution politics.

Windfall money is always treated with less respect than money earned through labour or long term investing. The threat of confiscation is always met with counter measures. There's nothing strange or unexpected about the way people act when faced with government actions of this kind.

The popularity of the idea that we can overcome the adverse effects of redistribution policies by improvements in education is further proof that there's a lack of empathy among people, because the impulse to spend what's received without effort and to protect that which has been earned the hard way is not due to a lack of education. A windfall is always celebrated with at least some excess, and a threat is always reacted to with at least some effort. Indoctrination can only temper these impulses, but it cannot remove them.

This is easy to understand for anyone with empathy because we react more or less the same way to windfalls and threats ourselves. We don't have to imagine ourselves poor or rich. All we have to imagine is that the windfall or threat comes to us one day.

But the people lacking in empathy have a tendency to imagine the poor and the rich as somehow different from themselves. The poor are imagined pure and good, and the rich are imagined mean and greedy. They then go on to explain all actions based on these clichés, with much confusion as a result.

Us against them

By Pedro Ribeiro Simões - Flickr: "Geração à Rasca" Demonstration, CC BY 2.0, Link