Misplaced Empathy Will Kill Us All

Guest Post from John Wilder

“Look, I just fix stuff, okay? This whole empathy thing it’s, uh, not exactly my strong point, all right?” – Andromeda

The Mrs. says I have no empathy.  I have no idea why she would feel that way.

I was in a pretty deep sleep, having another stupid dream.  My definition of a stupid dream is something like, “being at work, and writing an email”.  If I’m going to dream, I don’t want to waste it on work, I want to be out conquering the green-skinned warrior women from Alpha Centauri, not dreaming about doing my taxes.

Occasionally, though, I have a fully formed thought so perfect that it jars me out of a deep sleep, and I have to write it down, like that time I invented the goldfish treadmill, or the silent alarm clock that slapped The Mrs. in the face with a comically large clown glove so her alarm wouldn’t wake me up.

The Mrs. did not appreciate the prototype of that alarm clock.  The Mrs. then said, “The time is not right for that invention.”

Regardless, the subject of my slumber’s epiphany was . . . empathy.  It started with a dream of me going to work.  I was late (which never happens) so I was going 105 miles per hour (Trudeaus per fortnight) in a 25 miles per hour zone.  Someone in the dream said (I didn’t see them) that, “You leave John Wilder alone.  He was only speeding because he was late.”  I started laughing.  Here, someone was making excuses for me because of misplaced empathy.

I laughed, and woke up laughing.  I also knew I was changing what I was going to write about today.

In my defense, the sign said, “Speed limit 35 ahead” and there were three people in the car, so three times five is 105, right?

Empathy sounds good.  It is good, because empathy is really what enables conscience, remorse, and the power to change behavior that hurts others.  There’s even a term for people who don’t have empathy:  sociopath.  Oddly, that’s what my ex-wife called me during our marriage, but I thought my car just had a great suspension.

Regardless, when I ran over that pedestrian, I didn’t feel a thing.

So, yeah, empathy is important.  It’s important enough that psychologist Jonathan Haidt had it listed as number one on his list of the foundations of morality, though he used the word “care”.  I’ll skip the others for now for a later post, probably on Friday, so we can focus on just one:  care/harm, which I’ll call “empathy”.

That is the single foundation of morality that Leftists score higher on than folks on the Right.  And, in my boredom at work (in my dream) I figured it out – the reason why the Right can’t talk to the Left is that the Left is so full of empathy that they can’t stop crying enough to have a decent conversation.

The Mrs. screamed, “You never listen to a single word I say!”  What a funny way to start a conversation, right?

Before we get to the punchline, it’s very important to consider this question:  Who do normal people primarily feel empathy for?

• Those who are weaker than us. A good example to illustrate this is Bill Gates.  When Bill Gates lost $30 billion, who cried?  Not Bill.  I don’t think Bill cries at all unless he has solid gold tissue paper infused with Moon rocks and sasquatch hair to better absorb his tears.
• People who are experiencing similar problems to the ones they’ve had, and that are similar to them. I can’t really understand how a Kalahari Bushman feels after not getting an antelope, but I can understand how I feel when the Pizza Hut™ is 20 minutes late with the pizza.
• Connectedness to the object of empathy. Typically, I feel a lot more empathy for The Mrs. when she’s feeling blue than I do for Kim Jong Il when he runs out of vodka during his endless game of SimKorea®.  I feel more about people in my town than in the next town over, and by the time that it’s a bus full of 275 nuns and 1,043 orphans falling off a cliff in India, my empathy has drained down to, “Huh, maybe they should put up guardrails” and “Who knew that they had mountains in India?  Or nuns?”

It’s not horrible to feel this way, it’s natural.  I should care more about my parents (in general) than an Iraqi cabdriver in Paris.  And I can only imagine so much of the pain someone is suffering if I have no basis to relate to it.  And no one has felt sympathy for Bill Gates since 1982.

Leftists, though, score really high on empathy, much higher than people on the Right.  My theory is that most of them live in big cities, and live a much more anonymous and disconnected life than we do here in Modern Mayberry, where I can’t go into the liquor store without the clerk saying, “Oh, Wilder, you again.  Do you even have a home?”  The social fabric, ability to contribute, and sense of belongingness in smaller communities is often richer.

I would look exactly like that, if I had hair, and if it was brown, and if I hadn’t discovered carbohydrates.

I think this begins to rot their brains.  They have natural feelings of empathy, but no natural way to use them, so this normally virtuous process becomes subverted.  Ever see someone on the Right screaming because someone couldn’t kill babies in a state they don’t live in?  No.

But their empathy isn’t what people on the Right experience Leftists score higher in empathy tests (which shows how they feel), but those same Leftists contribute less to charities than people on the Right.  Why?  Because they think that everyone should feel the same compassion Leftists feel and everyone should share in and help out, so the Leftists raise taxes and take money by force to feed their need to be empathetic.

The result:  Leftist empathy is paid for using everyone’s money.  Sort of like my relationship with my kids, but if my kids had guns.

But it doesn’t stop there.  The particular thought that woke me up was the idea that a Leftist would explain away any crime if the person committing it met their empathy filter, because they care about empathy more than every other foundation of virtue.

This is devastating at the level of a civilization.  It means that, no matter what, feelings are now the highest form of virtue.  Let’s take some examples of this type of thinking in real life:

• “That man shouldn’t get a ticket for going 105 in a 25, he was late to work!”
• “Timmy didn’t mean to break your window, he was just playing, and he’s only four.”
• “How can they give him a DUI? His parents were alcoholics.”
• “No mother should have to fear her son will be shot while he’s out robbing convenience stores.”
• “It’s not fair that the homeowner had a weapon of war, an AK-15, when he shot that boy who only had a revolver.”
• “No human is illegal – besides, they do the work that we won’t.”
• “Those are mostly peaceful riots – only a few billion dollars’ worth of property damage was done. That’s why the store owners have insurance.”
• “Why not give them reparations? America owes it to them.”
• “How can Americans be bothered to have to have state-issued identification to vote? It’s unfair.”
• “Those Christians are awful! Why else would a trans person feel like she had to kill them?”
• “Muslim shooter kills 30. Muslims will be the most impacted by the backlash.”

Remember Bill Gates?  No one feels bad for him.  But Leftists feel empathy especially for those they look down on, that they feel better than.  The Left feels that the people the Left gives their empathy to are somehow lesser than they are.  They have no empathy for productive taxpayers, but empathy for murderers and looters.

Why do the Leftists throttle news about blacks killing blacks?  Because they treat them with the same empathy they treat toddlers.  Black people can’t be expected to know better, after all.  Why do they elevate news of an 85-year-old white man shooting a 16-year-old black kid while burying the story of a black man shooting up an entire white family?  Because Leftists view the white guy as more capable of self-control than the black guy, who shouldn’t be judged by this one event because there were thousands of people that he didn’t shoot, after all.

I wonder why one of these got national news attention?

In my humble opinion, the law should be entirely color blind.  And ideology blind.  That’s the reason we have the law.  The January 6 “rioters” should be punished in exactly the same fashion as the George Floyd “protestors” if they committed crimes.  Walking through the Capitol?  Yeah, not an issue.  Sitting at Pelosi’s desk and stealing her laptop?  That’s a crime, and the guy should be punished in a fair and proportionate way.  Period.

Many of the George Floyd rioters did far worse, yet few have paid for crimes up to and including murder and the $2 billion dollars in damages done.  The law has simply ceased to be ideology and color blind and is now the .  The idea that hate crimes have been enshrined in law and that “hate speech” is rapidly becoming criminalized despite that pesky First Amendment is telling that the justice system is becoming broken.

The last (nearly 60!) years since Johnson’s Great Society was implemented have shown trillions spent to work on the “root cause” of poverty and racial disparity in this country.  There have been trillions spent on this project out of empathy.  Result?  Roadway design is being called, by Transportation Secretary Zoolander, racist:

And the last three uniparty presidents, looking around, decided we just didn’t have enough foreigners, so they’ll Uber some in:

Unchecked, pathological empathy by the rank and file of the Left is destroying the country – if you pick a big city, it’s nearly certain that some new horror is occurring daily, and that there is no one even pretending to stop it.

Thanks, George Soros!

Pathological empathy is killing us, literally.  The destruction of society is ongoing.  And we know why.  What I do know is if we can see it, if we can ridicule it, and if we can polarize it we can make change happen.  The guy who dresses as a girl who got his own Bud Light® can?

He was the polarizing figure that society coalesced around, coming as he did on the shooting by yet another transsexual, brought it home for many.  “This has gone too far.”

So, point out the hypocrisy of this misplaced empathy when you can, and don’t dream about writing emails at work.

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