Principle 10: Empathy Makes Society Better
If I could change one thing about humanity...
What is the difference between sympathy and empathy?
Sympathy: The perception of the distress of another.
Empathy: The ability to take on another’s perspective, to feel what they feel.
They are both useful emotional tools. They are both helpful for society. But while the sympathetic person will see the homeless person and perhaps give them some loose change, the empathetic person might ask them how they are doing and if they can get them anything specific.
What’s the difference? Both felt for the homeless person, but the empathetic person put themselves in the position of the homeless person and thought if I were in that position, what would I want from another person?
I did this once with a young homeless person. The request? “Warm socks.” So I went to a nearby store and bought the warmest socks I could find.
If I could change one thing about humanity, I would increase everyone’s empathy level.
It would be much harder to physically harm someone if they were empathetic.
It would be much harder to emotionally harm someone if they were empathetic.
It would be much harder to go to war if we all truly felt how the other side was feeling.
Really, that’s how governments get their populace to support a war: they dial down the empathy response in you. They do this by othering the enemy — see, they are not like you at all, they do not deserve your empathy.
Yet every belligerent in every war ever fought was a human being, with a family back home, perhaps a dog or a cat, and a hope for a good job someday and to get married and have children. Once they stop killing those others over there!
I’m not naive. I know this is not possible even in non-war scenarios, and mental illness will ruin any waving of my magic wand on humanity. We live in a society, so we will have all types of people and all types of emotional responses, many of them unhelpful. Many, many people you meet will not be empathetic.
But to the extent that you can live a principled life, try to truly feel what the other person is feeling. It will help you react to them in exactly the way they need. It might even remind them of the need to be more empathetic toward others.
Empathy makes society better because it truly makes connections between people better. And what is society but people connecting with each other?
It’s interesting to me when we talk about empathy, emotions, and mental illness. I’ve observed each is still heavily conditioned.
For example, often the blame is dropped on mental illness as making that claim “well, we have a mental illness issue right now” is inaccurate.
It’s the easy blame to make without observing how are the current systems not allowing for people to thrive, so when they predictably don’t thrive we blame the outcome on mental illness instead of system failure.
The same with emotions. It seems there’s a lot of demonizing of emotions because mist have not learn how to work with them like they work with logic or reasoning.
Yes Othering. The scary or inhuman Other. People do it too.