brainpanhandler » Sat Sep 26, 2015 2:52 pm wrote:@guruilla,
I think we've had a communication breakdown. Either I've misunderstood you or you've misunderstood me or likely both. Suffice it to say, I like to believe, barring some abnormality, that we are all born with the ability to feel empathy and compassion. Not that this cannot be crushed out of us, in short order. I also believe that most if not all of us are broken and neurotic and have had "poisons" injected into us by our judeo/christian/capitalist/nationalist/patriarchal indoctrination. Reich called it the
emotional plague. Maybe that helps a little bit?
My own superficial experience would suggest that most people I interact with seem nice enough; it’s easy to assume from this that murderous predators are relatively rare.
On the other hand, there is the rapidly mounting evidence (of which RI is such a rare repository) that indicates the opposite, that the whole of western (and probably eastern) society is founded on the complex and dedicated machinations of sociopathic types and that they are everywhere among us, not merely restricted to the 1% of the 1% holding the ‘true power and wealth.’ For every Jimmy Savile, there seem to be a hundred enablers, and a thousand more who enable the enablers by looking the other way or simply refusing to believe the evidence of their senses.
The question I am asking myself, just about every day, is, what makes me so sure I would recognize a practicing (as opposed to non-practicing!) sociopath when I saw one? Based on the evidence, as well as my experience, individuals, families, groups, and entire communities have successfully concealed their destructive activities and natures for years, even lifetimes. Anyone who has been a victim of this sort of thing—or even who knows someone who has—knows this, and yet everyone who hasn’t experienced it directly (or who believes they haven’t, since the concealment often extends to the victims too) blithely assumes it is not happening in their own homes, groups, communities.
What’s wrong with that picture?!Regarding empathy, that’s one of the those words that gets thrown around a lot without there being much understanding of it, IMO, much less direct experience. Simon Baron-Cohen has maybe a useful model that poses two types of empathy: cognitive and affective. Affective empathy is characteristic of autistics and even part of why extreme cases of autism entail a lack of social functionality. Affective empathy is NOT an aid to survival, social or otherwise. It is relatively rare.
Cognitive empathy is much more common, and it’s not only possessed in spades by sociopaths (I think Cohen uses Ted Bundy as an example), it’s essential to their success
as predators. It entails not only knowing what other people (i.e., potential prey) are thinking and feeling to anticipate their actions, it also entails being able to put potential prey at ease by feigning sensitivity, kindness, “empathy,” etc.
Affective empathy isn’t about feeling sympathy for someone. Technically, it means experiencing their experience, including their pain, as one’s own. I don’t think this is a volitional thing either; I think it relates to having an unformed ego or social identity, and therefore very few barriers to separate one's own psyche from the other person’s. And if this kind of empathy isn’t volitional, then it can’t be selective either (though if one was functioning socially, one could always choose who to interact with!). So if someone says they draw the line at having empathy for narcissistic sociopaths who lack empathy, they probably aren’t talking about empathy at all. They’re talking more about sympathy, which is relatively superficial—like identifying, or not, with a character in a movie, based on how likable they are.
To illustrate, my cat has chronic asthma and a terminal heart condition. He wheezes a lot and every wheeze could be his last (his heart is overlarge and it pushes against his lungs). There is nothing I can do when he wheezes besides be there, and naturally I feel bad for him. Sometimes I feel really bad. But I don’t experience what he’s going through, much as I wish I could, and much as I wish I could take on his condition as my own and relieve him of some of it. Maybe to some tiny degree I can do that, but it’s not really a question of how badly I want it, or of how bad I feel for him. It’s more a question of how willing or able I am to let go of my own psychic defenses and be open to the raw reality of his suffering. Feeling sorry for him not only doesn’t help, in some weird way I think it interferes with having real, affective empathy, like it’s one of the shields we have against it.
Mostly when he wheezes, I go off into my mind and wait for it to be over. Sometimes I even feel angry with him for dying. The pain of empathizing is so great that my mind creates a wall against it, a wall of amnesia if you like, a pain barrier. So not only do I think real empathy is far from common in the social realm of egos, I am not sure it even exists ~
outside of individuals we routinely write off as basket-cases.
Real empathy is Christlike (since iamwhomiam was just speaking of demons), and I think it’s probably about as rare as Christ. And for those who don’t think Christ even existed, I rest my case.
Needless to say, this is only my point of view. If it has an underlying relevance to this thread, it’s the same point I made already: that the difference between me and a sociopathic child rapist/murder is, all talk of demons aside, quantitive and not qualitative.
Even if this turns out not to be true, and there are soulless demon-vessels among us, I still think this is the sanest way to proceed.
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
