A page from The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley
I guess it’s not exactly surprising, but it seems to explain a lot of things I’m witnessing in my later adulthood. I’ve always felt deeply impressed by selfless heroes, but I never really pondered the profile of heroism.
People are terrified of empathy. Empathy is the capacity (or even the obligation) to experience the suffering of others. Suffering HURTS. Empathy HURTS. People will do anything to avoid thinking about the victim on their plate.
Aversion of pain is a pretty powerful deterrent. I guess there may need to be a critical mass of empathic individuals in a community to tip the scale in favor of everyone being more empathic and feeling generally better for it. Misery shared and understood amongst peers seems to always feel better than misery in solitude.
A history of trauma is more common among people who refuse to harm animals on the basis of empathy (as opposed to being plant based for their health or the environment or something) than among the general population. I suspect that empathy is innate. I suspect that people who have experienced trauma have less capacity to ignore, interfere with, and override their empathy.
But isn’t this argument exactly what the book above is saying is false in their findings? Rescuers tended to have better relationships with their parents and given less traumatic punishments.
I suppose you could be referring to non-familial or non-violent traumas. In any case though, this would be sympathy rather than empathy. Those people are less likely to traumatize or otherwise harm a creature because they sympathize due to their personal trauma
The text does not speak of trauma. Trauma is not “bad things that happen to you,” it is “things that happen to you that break you.” Two people might have the same experience. One receives life-long trauma and one receives a valuable lesson. You might expect people who have been beaten by their parents to be more likely to bear trauma, but this text doesn’t make that claim. You’d have to call on something else.
This text appears to me to be saying that children who witness their parents suppressing their empathy (such as they must to inflict physical pain) are more likely to do the same.
Ripley discusses trauma early in the book and there appears to be some correlation between the size of a person’s hippocampus and their capacity to absorb and rebound from traumatic events.
Even that is too strong, imo. The vast majority of empathy lacking conservatives are themselves dirt poor, and on the plate of another.
But it still hurts to think about how bad others might have it, especially when you’re so beat down by life that you are barely making it by yourself, so they buy into an easier answer, “the other”.
I hope empathy has a place in this conversation too!
But… I’m confused. Didn’t Musk call empathy a weakness? Surely someone so tolerant, inclusive, and humble couldn’t be wrong.
Fucking hell. I can’t escape being reminded of this shitstain everywhere, even if I filter political posts.
A parasite keeps reminding you it’s there until it (or you) is destroyed.
Yeah I wish we could filter comments as well.
programming.dev##article.comment-node:has(div.comment-content:has(p:has-text(/Musk/i)))Put that into your adblocker custom filters (assuming you’re using a browser)
Yeah, I heard ignoring the shit world around you is a really good way to effect change
I tried to effect change for 8 years. I gave up when Americans decided that they wanted the shit world. My mental health can’t handle it, I literally am losing years of my life with every moment I spend reading about how the people in this country are hell bent on turning it into the worst possible existence.
We were in this position before, a period of even greater division, even to the point of violence.
Our mistake was not teaching the fascist confederates the price of evil.
It’s about as effective as talking about it on social media all day, every day. The people making real change are out in the real world doing concrete things - not just posting about it online. Shaming people for not wanting to be miserable 24/7 because of the constant firehose of bad news isn’t just unproductive - it’s counterproductive.
Cover your eyes, plug your ears, and ignore the cries of those suffering around you.
As opposed to passing drivel on the web even where it’s completely unrelated, because that solves all problems.
Love your username btw 😄
It was just a typo. 😁
Choosing to filter out political content from your social media feed isn’t necessarily about denial or apathy. For many people, it’s a conscious decision to preserve their mental clarity and avoid being constantly pulled into emotionally charged, tribal, or manipulative discourse. Being well-informed doesn’t require immersing yourself in an endless stream of outrage, nor does stepping back from that mean you’re turning a blind eye to anything.
There’s a difference between ignoring reality and choosing how and when to engage with it. Most of what passes for political content online isn’t a sober presentation of facts or ideas - it’s performance, manufactured outrage, and algorithm-driven noise. If someone wants to stay sane and focus on things they can actually influence in their immediate life, I don’t see that as sticking their head in the sand. I see it as setting healhy boundaries in an environment that’s often designed to provoke rather than inform.
People aren’t morally obligated to be constantly exposed to negativity just to prove they care. In fact, thoughtful action tends to come from those who can step back from the noise and think clearly, not from those who are perpetually consumed by it.
Paul Bloom has written an entire book arguing Against Empathy
I’m not sure I entirely agree with his thesis but it’s not a completely outrageous idea. I often wish I could tone down my level of empathy as well.
Reading the page, it doesn’t sound like he’s against empathy at all. He’s specifically against making decisions based on “feels” and targeting empathy specifically because he seems to believe it’s a tool often misused.
For a second I was expecting something akin to Radical Candor’s “ruinous empathy” which has been used an excuse by managers the world over to justify their inherent lack of any empathy for the people around them.
Seems like an interesting read, adding it to my list. Thanks.
I got caught up on the term ‘empathy for self.’ I haven’t read the book, but I visited the link and couldn’t get past what I felt was a tragically flawed oxymoron. But maybe that’s a flaw with the Wikipedia article and not the source material, so I’ll endeavor to seek out the book at some point to learn more.
Empathy being a sign of privilege isn’t the truth I needed to read today :/
When you are fighting to survive, it’s only normal to have less bandwidth to care for others.
That’s the irony of it. I’m by no means a scholar of Thich Nhat Hanh, but I remember reading an account from his early life as a Vietnamese monk during the conflict with imperial France in which he had basically nothing and was himself barely surviving, but still found a way to feel peace and express compassion for a young French soldier suffering from malaria who desperately raided the monastery at gunpoint.
In a weird way, having emotionally available and supportive parents is absolutely a privilege. People are able to develop empathy in spite of bad parents, and good parenting isn’t a guarantee to a good person, but parenting is a major factor for life success. I wish it weren’t, and I hope we can build a society that could guarantee every child full opportunities.
Luckily, it is the kind of privilege you can pass on to your children.
You don’t have to have any other privileges for that. Just patience and love (yep, not easy, but doable by all means)
How is it privilege?
My parents were fucking great. Not the best but damn it they did the best they could with what they were handed. I can see how it could be considered a privilege.
Not everyone has good parents
You can break the cycle
I think there’s also a sort of autodidactic type of learning empathy, even if your parents don’t teach it to you.
I think it’s — at least for a part of the population — a very natural thing and would have to be actively discouraged as a kid to make it go away.
Although idk I did read a ton so maybe the books raised me idk
Reading fiction teaches empathy, even if you don’t have it naturally or your parents are shit humans. There’s something about the way a novel puts you in the back seat of someone’s mind, the cliche “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”
Which is why it’s concerning that:
Many adults don’t read a book after high school. Many high schools don’t even assign books anymore - just passages, because that’s what on the ACT.
fwiw, I didn’t read 0-17 for fun because reading was homework and fuck doing what you tell me.
I started reading in my 20s. Hopefully others too.
Our shitty education system makes kids associate reading a book with homework, and many adults don’t outgrow that association
Many kids in the US weren’t even taught phonics.
Teachers were forced to use an expensive curriculum program that didn’t work - and similar shit had been proven not to work in the 70’s. For lots of children, reading is too difficult to be enjoyable because they don’t know phonics.
Reading books are known to increase empathy, as the very act itself forces you to see the world from someone else’s perspective, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes every time you open a new book.
It’s called trauma.
There’s some truth here, like poorly-treated children probably have difficulty with empathy, except I’ve known a few people that had very hard childhoods and are some of the kindest people I’ve ever met, as if they developed past those issues to understand how important empathy is.
I also come from a large family, and while my siblings and my cousins had very similar upbringings, the variability in things like empathy and justice is extensive even among siblings (notably including twins).
To me it seems like there’s a strong element of innate character trait with this stuff, as we’ve watched kids grow up and seen their character at 2 years old remain consistent into adulthood. If this stuff were driven mostly by environment, then at least most kids would be similar… And we’ve found they aren’t, it’s all over the map, unpredictable by the environment.
Not to say environment doesn’t/can’t influence, it certainly can, but I don’t believe it’s usually the primary driver, just in cases where the environment is notably negative
There very well could be something innate. Later in the chapter, Ripley writes about heroes who did what they did because they felt they wouldn’t have been able to live with the sense of cowardice for not acting. The fear of future self loathing overpowered their fear of present peril.
As for nurture vs. nature origins of empathy, I’m looking forward to watching Boarding On Insanity.
It makes perfect sense to me that people who suffer abuse or neglect when young would develop a deep-rooted drive to look out for themselves first and foremost. It would be (literally, socially, and emotionally) a survival mechanism. Unfortunately, it would leave less room than others might have for empathy.
I don’t imagine this would ever go away completely, even if their situation improved by adulthood.
I had asshole impatient parents (two of them), and I was like that. After I moved out, I had to learn empathy.
Ive been in a few emergency situations at- and outside-of work, and I’m always told that I’m a great leader who is calm and quick to act effectively.
My point is that empathy and leadership isnt dependent on parents.
Not entirely, and you did a great job of overcoming that. But learning empathy and really anything is easiest as a child and the parents are the best avenue for that.
What kinds of things did you consciousnessly and intentionally do to train yourself into a healthier and more empathic frame of mind? Did you naturally gravitate toward a vocation requiring calm decisiveness under pressure in dynamic and unpredictable situations?
I can’t say it was intentional. I never set out to become more empathetic. It was just that, as I began to navigate the world on my own, I realized how selfish and wrong was my thinking about the world and the people i met.
I learned that eating animals was a major cause of the climate catastrophe shortly after moving from my patents house, and so I became vegetarian and many of my friends were vegan. My initial motivation for this was mostly still selfish, since its still in my personal interest to avoid climate catastrophe. But obviously many of my peers were veg for more empathetic reasons.
Also at Uni many of my friends were poorer than me. So being exposed to poor vegan friends showed me a lot of what I wasn’t taught by my parents (empathy).
And then I went traveling, and I was amazed at how kind most strangers I met were. We’re taught to live in fear and that others want to hurt us, but I found most strangers wanted to help. And those who have less generally give more than rich folks.
As for work, I’ve worked as a sysadmin. It can be high stress when things break and you’re called-in to fix it. Its important to have a cool head. I’ve also done a lot of trekking, sometimes in sketchy situation. I think the leader attribute might be more my nature, whereas empathy was learned (or, maybe, being a selfish asshole was unlearned)
This book is fantastic as a whole. Highly recommend.
highlighting images of text (about empathy), breaking accessibility
❌ (ironic) cringe
quoting text for accessibility, searchability, generally superior functionality
✔️ based
100%. Transcription is an act of empathy for blind folks.
Sorry. I’ve never in my life ever been accused of being based, but my personal memories consistently paint me as a paragon of cringe, so you might be on to something. You’re welcome to transcribe any part(s) you think might be relevant to improve its accessibility, searchability, and generally superior functionality.
Thats your job, as the poster.
