The Empathy Asymmetry

If you visit someone in an asylum, you'll encounter people firmly grounded in non-reality. You can't deny their reality because, obviously, it feels real to them. You must find the empathy to meet them in their perspective; bridging the gap on your end. And, of course, none will return the favor and consider your perspective, much less try to "meet you" there.

The situation doesn't improve when you walk out the door and into the greater world. Still everyone locked into their respective realities, demanding to be met there, while yours seems peripheral at best. The bridging — the empathy — always falls to you. Of course it does!


As a child, my parents pressured me to send letters to my grandparents, who I barely knew. I tried to "catch them up" on my activities, though they'd never shown the slightest interest. I dutifully sent cheerful letters, and it took me ages to register how strange it was that they never wrote back. Obviously, I was in the letter-writing position. The bridging — the empathy — fell to me.

Of course it does?

The Evil Glee of Sanctimonious Scorn

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

- Aldous Huxley (in "Crome Yellow")

"Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle: Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other dark tetrad personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others."

- Gurwinder

Actual fascism and racism can't be fought while shouting down every disagreeable utterance as fascistic and racist. Performative gesturing dulls the blade. We've mostly been commoditizing rage, stoking tribalism, and diluting morality.

The unquestionable good of racial tolerance doesn't make strident anti-racism great. Those yearning for greatness would be better served by creation than evisceration. This is not a video game where points are earned by slaying Baddies.

A useful thought experiment: deem yourself the villain and observe where it leads. This requires courage, but that's unavoidable. Screaming at transgressors on social media isn't courage. It's self-indulgence—and, per the two quotes above, counterproductively draws from our worst impulses.


I remember, with nausea, the "Moral Majority" movement of the 1980s, where an extreme faction tried to impose its narrow, rigid doctrine on a heterogeneous nation. It boggles my mind that Progressives, apparently having seen great value in that approach, became the new sanctimonious enforcers of moral rectitude.