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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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That’s not what empathy means. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they are feeling, not to feel bad for them when they’re not doing well.
What you’re describing is more like sympathy.
Yes, and I don't need to know the details of someone's life to do so. Do you? You can't feel empathy for e.g. Floridians who recently went through that hurricane?
That's also a form of empathy. You get that, right?
No, because doing badly doesn’t imply feeling badly. People going through bad times respond in a variety of ways. They don’t all respond exactly the same way.
Of course you can respond by donating to help people who have been affected by a disaster. Everyone does that. That’s what sympathy does for us.
Empathy is different! To truly have empathy for someone means to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do. It’s very difficult to achieve. Many married couples never reach it.
So you're claiming that most people never have empathy for other people... Sure, that sounds very realistic and not-at-all "holier than thou".
I mean, I've seen plenty of examples where other people have empathized with me, but I guess I just happen to be surrounded by living incarnations of Buddha himself.
Most people have some degree of empathy: for their friends, family, and their in-group. There are plenty of people who don’t, though.
Empathy is the skill of the therapist, the con artist, the salesperson, the poker player. Not everyone is good at understanding other people’s emotions and motivations.
Oh, so now people can have empathy for others without having to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do? Just a bit ago you declared that to be an absolute requirement for "true" empathy. Or is it fake empathy they are feeling?
There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.
To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.
Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.
To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.
Okay, so we at least agree that you can feel empathy towards someone without having to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do. I'm still confused why you brought that up, since I never claimed to have 100% true™ full chonglibloodsport-certified empathy for every person on the planet.
And I'm pretty sure only a psychopath would feel absolutely no empathy towards someone they don't know - you will at least empathize regarding common human emotions, e.g. I don't need to know some random chinese couple to feel happy if I see a husband running to hug his wife in an airport.
So what's your point? You've already walked back that you need to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do.
Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.
Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.
Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!
Did I ever claim something different?
I wonder how it feels to be talked to like this.
How should I know? I don't know chonglibloodsport enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do.