The Horrors of Living in an Overly Empathetic Society

The whims of empathy

There are probably very few people who would tell you that empathy is a bad thing per se. In certain circumstances, almost all of us can appreciate giving or receiving some empathy.

Maybe when you were a kid and you had a truly awful day, your dad gave you a hug, went out and threw the baseball around with you for a while, and then let you stay up a little late to make you feel better. Maybe the old lady in front of you is counting out the pennies from her change purse and looks to be a dollar short to pay for her groceries, so you offer it up and tell her, "I'm sure you'd do the same for me, have a nice day." Maybe your friend is depressed, so you invite him to go out with a group of friends to walk in the park and pump some iron because you know he feels terrible, and you want him to get out of the house and improve his mood.

All this sounds healthy, right? It's a nice, well-meaning gesture from the person doing it, it helps the target and there is no real downside. Again, nice, healthy, good stuff.

But, what if the same kid falls to pieces every day over just about anything? He doesn't get his favorite food for dinner. Mom was "mean to him" for making him clean up his toys. He doesn't want to study. Is Dad still doing the right thing by catering to him all day? What if the old lady is your friend and every time people at work order a pizza, she wants to bum a slice without paying for it? Should you still give it to her every time? What if your friend who's depressed because nobody wants to hang out with him is easily offended, complains incessantly, picks fights with everyone, and then gets huffy if they refuse to put up with it? If you insist on taking him anyway, are you helping him at the expense of penalizing your other friends with his presence?

Empathy is a little like water. In small doses, it's terrific. However, in overly large amounts it can become a destructive force.

How?

Well, first of all, taken to an extreme, empathy can actually be bad for the target.

If you've ever watched reality TV shows like My 600-Pound Life or Intervention, you will frequently see parents, spouses, or family members enabling junkies or people that eat so much that they can't get out of bed. Why? They don't want to see someone they care about suffer. So, they go to the grocery store and get them the worst food imaginable or give them money to buy drugs. This helps them avoid one type of immediate suffering, but it creates another type of long-term suffering:

We see this play out in many other ways.

If someone is so weak and soft that they tell you they need a "safe space" or have a "trigger warning," are you helping them by giving it to them or do they desperately need to toughen up? Does it really help junkies for cities to give them clean needles and turn a blind eye to open drug use? Even with the minimum wage. Should we be focused on raising the minimum wage for the roughly 1.5% of workers that get it or should we want to find ways to encourage those people to improve their skills so they'll be worth more in the long term?

Are you doing people a favor by going along with their claims that they’re victims, really the opposite sex, or that they can never succeed because of (fill in the "ism" of the week here)? Not at all.

When you feed, reward, and encourage weakness and mediocrity, you get more weakness and mediocrity. Weak and mediocre people may welcome that, at least initially, but it also makes it extremely hard for them to achieve their potential. It's like if you took a 5-year-old and gave them all the cake and ice cream they wanted to eat because you didn't want them to feel bad. They'll probably eat more and more of those foods. They may very well become addicted to eating like that, but ultimately, it's going to make them extremely sick and unhealthy. Empathy is like that. Too much empathy is even worse for a person than too much cake and ice cream.

Of course, the other big problem with empathy is that offering it to one particular group often comes at the expense of another group. Once we leave the realm of good faith attempts to select people by merit, what gets described as empathy in theory often looks much more like rank favoritism or outright discrimination to the people being penalized by it. In fact, an awful lot of the strife in our society today comes from exactly this sort of supposed "empathy.”

If we fully fleshed this concept out, it could fill a book, so let’s cover just a few examples.

Here’s Christopher Rufo talking to Joe Rogan about why he moved out of Seattle:

But I remember our oldest son was in kindergarten, first grade at the time. And we would be walking to school a few blocks up, and we'd have to be avoiding schizophrenics, avoiding tents, avoiding people shooting up, avoiding people just shitting in the street, walking, walking, just walking, just walking. And so you're trying to kind of navigate your kids around. There was a homeless encampment about 100 yards away from the school with probably 40 or 50 guys cooking drugs, stealing property, causing trouble. And then you talk to the administrators at the time, say, hey, this is a problem. I don't accept this. I don't like this. And they say, oh, well, we have to be compassionate to our houseless neighbors. It's like, no, we don't. This is a danger to kids. And it got so bad that they were teaching the kids what to do when they found hypodermic needles in the playground. Oh, my God, this is a problem. I don't want this as a parent, I want you to prevent them having to pick up hypodermic needles. And it's like a group of people that are. So it's like compassion also has to be limited.

Empathy for those homeless people and junkies directly came at the expense of the kids at that school.

Speaking of school, remember this case?

Brendan Depa knocked his teacher unconscious and continued savagely attacking after she was unconscious. It seems highly likely that he would have killed her if he hadn’t been stopped. Depa had 3 prior battery arrests and has gotten into a violent altercation in jail since then. However, because he’s autistic and simple, we’ve seen numerous headlines like this:

What you see in that picture is the price of having endless empathy for this hyper-violent autistic teen. Would you want to teach him? Would you want your kids to go to school with him? It’s entirely possible he could kill someone, but what? Because some people have empathy for him because he’s simple, everyone around him has to be put at risk?

Similarly, people on the Left seem to have endless empathy for men who’ve decided to pretend to be women, but that empathy comes at a huge cost to real women. There are little girls using the bathroom with men. Women in locker rooms having to change in front of men. Women in prison who are sharing cells with men. In one sense, sports may be the worst of all because you have women who may have trained their whole lives being displaced or losing out to a mediocre male who’s inferior to them in every way except that he has a huge genetic advantage because he was born a man:

Raising one group up because you feel empathy for them often requires pushing another group down in the mud. It’s ugly. It’s contentious. It’s extraordinarily unfair, but that’s the price of abandoning merit and one set of rules for everyone for the whims of empathy.

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