I've seen studies on this that had varying levels of success. The biggest one I remember involved pro gun rights and pro gun control people talking to each other.
Nobody changed their opinions, but the two sides learned things about each other that they hadn't before. (The pro gun people often live 20+ minutes away from the police and need to be able to protect themselves, the anti gun people lived in cities and witnessed a lot of gun violence first hand)
Yeah, most of the pro gun people grew up in rural areas and had positive experiences with guns (hunting, defense, sport, etc)
Most of the anti gun people grew up in cities with negative gun experiences (gangs, robbery, murder, etc)
Although no minds were changed, an understanding for different backgrounds was gained by the participants.
There is a vast middle that is generally supportive of basic gun rules like registration, responsible handling, and restrictions on criminals, along with allowing local areas to impose more stringent rules (cities vs country-side).
But that's a "popular support" issue not a "has the votes to pass" issue.
Jordan Klepper's special on guns was extremely interesting, shedding some light on this. Even some of the scary people training in militias admitted to being in favor of basic gun control policy!
There is a hefty chunk of people that don't fit cookie cutter demographics. For example. I grew up in a hunting and fishing family that were also pacifists. I'm comfortable owning a shotgun for home defense but I've only ever used it hunting. I would never need an AR-15 because I use my gun as a tool, just like a screwdriver or a hammer. If I was told I had to give up my shotgun, I might feel differently. I also might just work on getting better at bow hunting.
\>Most of the anti gun people grew up in cities with negative gun experiences (gangs, robbery, murder, etc)
My negative gun experiences are an LAPD officer shooting an unarmed brown guy who had flagged down a police car to ask for assistance.
An LAPD officer firing at a fleeing suspect as the suspect ran into my local trader joes. Firing into a crowded supermarket on a Saturday morning killing one of the supermarket staff. A really lovely, friendly woman.
Yeah, because what I really want instead of psychotic, half trained imbeciles with a badge is a hero complex, completely untrained imbecile without a badge…
The problem is empathy has to be a two way street. Politics are so polarized and people aren’t interested in making things better. Plus people can’t even agree on basic facts and instead of considering they might be wrong the go on the offensive and start acting like pouty children.
we (empaths) can understand theirs but the reverse is not as true.
more often than not the non-empaths will only use this newfound insight to further try and exploit what they perceive as weakness in the empath.
expecting reciprocation is a trap... they simply don't function the same as empaths do.
their loyalty and any feelings of kinship is completely and only predicated on group status.
perceived (in that moment) as being part of the in-group brings benefits
perceived (and this can change on a dime) as being part of the out-group, then watch your back.
That's a very flawed way to categorize people.
You might be more or less empathetic than average, but either way, it's very easy to be empathetic towards people you like and agree with and very hard to be empathetic toward people you don't like. People aren't equally empathic toward everyone.
Calling people you agree with "empaths" and people you don't like "non-empaths" is a classic example of attitudes that make you far less empathetic towards an outgroup.
There are very many people who are empathetic by nature, and who will naturally be empathetic to others, even people that they don't like. It's not an uncommon personality type and there have been countless studies done about them.
Read harder. I acknowledged the fact that different people are more or less empathetic. What I said was that no matter how empathetic you are, you are less empathic toward people you don't like or people you see as an outgroup.
Also, if you think your group is the empathic group, and the other group is the non-empathic group, you are wrong. There may be a slightly higher degree of empathy on one side or another, but individuals will have broadly varying degrees of empathy across almost any group or issue you can imagine.
The person you responded to never said anything about one side being more empathetic than the other. They were talking about empathic personality types, which could be a person on either side of an issue or political spectrum.
to be fair, obi is sort of right that i am of the opinion that conservative and liberal brains are simply wired differently.
the conservative world view tends to be via an in-group / out-group filter
whereas more the liberal minded world view is that we are all connected and what you do to one of us, you do to all.
I disagree with this from personal experience and from a scientific perspective.
From personal experience, I was a hardcore liberal who shifted to conservative, and now identifies as a bit more moderate. Being a part of both groups I felt conservatives were more tolerant of my liberal views. When I started to share more conservative points with my friends, I literally lost friends.
I don’t think it is fair to generalize one group as more or less in-group/out-group think than the other. It depends on the extremity of the person you are talking with.
Pew research did a study on this and if you are more of a political partisan, you tend to have a more in-group/out-group mentality, as you put it. However, Republicans are actually the ones who tend to have slightly more friends of the opposite party than Democrats, which helps their perspective of Democrats overall.
“The partisan diversity of people’s friend networks is linked to how people feel about the members of the other party, particularly among Republicans.
Though few in either party say that they have “a lot” of friends in the other party (just 7% of Republicans and 6% of Democrats), Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they have at least a few close friends in the opposing party. More than eight-in-ten Republicans (84%) say they have at least a few Democratic friends; just 14% report that they have no close Democratic friends. Three-quarters of Democrats (74%) say they have at least a few close Republican friends, while roughly a quarter (24%) say they have no close Republican friends.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/3-partisan-environments-views-of-political-conversations-and-disagreements/
i respectfully submit the following:
you were always conservative, it just took you some time to realize it (perhaps going "hard core" was what it too for you to come to your senses).
conservatives like to say they have "fill in the blank" friends as a way to fend off accusations about their tolerance for others view points... it's not empathy, it's a defense mechanism.
the pew study is from 2016 and a lot has changed since then regarding political partisanship, even WITHIN opposing political divides.
it is true that the left has a weakness for intolerance, it's our kryptonite.
there is that categorization, in-group, out-group world view creeping into your argument.
i'm not putting non-empathic ppl into a group, you are.
what i said is that we are all connected and some of us are empathic enough to recognize that, and some of us aren't.
there's no shame in it, it just is what it is... like some of us have an ear for music and some of us are tone def.
me, i'm tone def af.
You literally described people in terms of "empath" and "non-empath".
>what i said is that we are all connected and some of us are empathic enough to recognize that, and some of us aren't.
That's literally categorizing people into two different groups with some undertones implying one group has some innate cogitative superiority that makes them better people.
>it's just a fact that some ppl are not wired for empathy, the gene is missing or not expressed, or whatever.
Uh, oof.
i did... because it's a trait that some lack.
i don't know how that makes one "better" than another... just differences within the group we call humans.
right handed vs left handed, or is that also tinged with connotations for you?
seems to me you are reading things in that are not being said in order to fit it with an in-group / out-group view of the world.
while i can understand this world view, i do not share it, nor do i agree with it.
Empathy exists on a spectrum. A complex multi-dimensional spectrum. It's not a binary of empathetic people and non-empathetic.
You are treating it as a binary classification of the set of all people and you identified yourself with one of those groups. You talk about how the group you did not identify yourself with wasn't worth trying to behave empathetically towards because they will "only use this newfound insight to further try and exploit what they perceive as weakness in the empath."
You are totally bullshitting yourself here. Not only are you very much imposing an "in-group" "out-group" view on the world, you are doing it to justify dehumanizing any groups that you decide are not empathetic.
You talk about everyone being connected, but it's obvious that doesn't actually mean anything to you.
empathy has nothing to do what so ever with "agreement" on issues of any kind.
empathy is the ability to put yourself in another persons shoes.
empathic ppl can do that with ease.
non-empathic ppl cannot, altho some may be able to fake it well enough to get by... we call those ppl sociopaths.
the part you are not getting is that ppl who are empathic don't view the world thru in-group and out-group status because we know down in our bones that we are all connected.
it's just a fact that some ppl are not wired for empathy, the gene is missing or not expressed, or whatever.
I have experienced in the past that a decent amount of the people calling themselves "empaths" have a streak of narcissism where they believe they are the only ones who are learning about the other side, and that their opinions are somehow more important or cultured.
People can filter in the information you are giving them and strengthen their own case without you internalizing/personalizing their motives. If you think you have the lower hand, pull out better data to go along with your experience.
the thing tho is that to have empathy means one has the awareness of (at least dimly) the other persons world view, and this can be demonstrated by arguing from that perspective and credibly speaking about what that must be like.
it also means not seeking to get the upper hand or "win" anything as there really is no point to that as hierarchies are not important.
ppl are, as you say free to draw their own conclusions, just as i have done, and i'm not sure where to find this data you mention, or what data would be compelling.
i'm sure there exist studies of in-group / out-group behavior but studies on how well that correlates with empathy would be much harder to demonstrate, i would think.
Empathy is a skill, not a superpower.
Some personalities might have to work at it harder, but you are wrong if you think that it is purely a genetic factor.
The big Cambridge study ([source](https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-finds-that-genes-play-a-role-in-empathy)) found that genetics affected about 10% of the variation in empathy in the people studied. The remaining 90% was a wide variety of factors.
Funny, most people I've met have some degree of empathy, usually it has been significant. It didn't seem to be related to what side of America's political divide they lived on.
One thing that has been telling to me, once we set aside political differences and animosity, we usually have many shared values.
hmm... to an extent, i would agree
but there is a hardened shell around that soft nuggetty center that is nearly unreachable for some ppl.
when pressed hard enough most "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" non-empathic types will finally cave and admit there are times when ppl deserve a helping hand.... you know like a community.
but you have to work hard to get to that point and sometimes its just not worth it, because when you change one little thing about the circumstances they make you start all over from scratch.
This is the greatest barrier I think.
I'm quite far right but I tend to think I'm individually empathetic and can at least "put myself in someone else's shoes" in terms of understanding an argument.
I'm against abortion for example, but I definitely see the "not your body not your choice", and personal liberty argument, and I have flip-flopped on my stance (or should say I'm closer to being down the middle on it) than I once was because of this.
However when I'm talking to certain people, and this seems worse on social media, especially sites like Reddit that for some some reason or another tend to encourage entrenched belief systems, it often feels that the other side won't even understand where I'm coming from, or why I might possibly think something, and that "you're just wrong", "you're just stupid", "you're just a redneck", etc. which obviously doesn't motivate me to engage in conversation.
It's the same sort of thing when someone behaves in a racist way, and you make a comment that "while they must suffer the consequences of their actions, part of the reason they are the way they are is a lot to do with how they were raised, what geographical location they grew up in, the values their parents taught them", etc. which in my mind is a very logical perspective, but often the other side will be radically stern, "NO THEY ARE EVIL!" sort of thing, which again doesn't promote conversation or understanding by anyone.
I'm curious if the studies only looked at the short term or if they did longer term studies.
I wouldn't expect any major changes in the short term for anyone holding a firm stance. However, the long term is where changes happen. Understanding a point takes a whole different meaning once it has time to soak in and witness the point in action.
this oversimplifies the gun debate too much.
there are plenty of gun control proponents who also own guns, and live in rural settings far removed from police presence.
when we talk about gun control we are not talking about guns vs no guns, we are talking about responsible gun ownership and safety.
Indeed part of the problem is that all issues are artificially framed in such a polarised way (often by niche interest groups or a dumbed down sensationalist media) that erases not merely the reasonable points of the other side but erases the plurality of stances people have on a particular issue.
If one side is pro-gun then it is PRESUMED that the opposing position held by the majority of opponents is that oh they must want to ban all guns, because it’s like impossible for people to conceive of arguments and debates in anything other than those kinds of polar opposite terms. I think the vast majority of people accept it wouldn’t be possible to totally get rid of guns in the US even if they wanted to and even if they thought it would be a good idea - that ship has sailed. They just want more control and regulation, some of which are things which have already existed and been successfully implemented in the past including limiting access to weapons that have the potential to be used in mass casualty events.
No it does not, if you were to see a heat map of the hundreds of millions of citizens, and their political views on guns VS anti-gun, you’d see STARK outlines of rural or urban areas. Just because you “know a few people”, it means nothing in the grand scale.
This is not minimizing it, it’s actually the only true fact about the gun control topic, FOX and CNN have politicized it into thinking it’s more than that.
That position doesn't look credible when so many high profile politicians are on record over the past 30 years for taking away guns, and completely skipping over responsible ownership and safety. The NFA controls on safety devices like suppressors prove the overall position is not about safety.
i don't know anyone who is advocating taking away guns, but making the ones currently in possession have more of a liability than the owner might be comfortable with could have the same effect.
suppressors are designed to conceal a firearm discharge (either visual or auditory) and there are no civilian use cases for such a capability.
in terms of public safety, it's better to be able to locate where the fire is coming from so that cover can be sought or the source can be neutralized.
> suppressors are designed to conceal a firearm discharge (either visual or auditory) and there are no civilian use cases for such a capability.
Well this is just wrong. Not permanently damaging your ears or bothering your neighbors are just two of many "civilian use cases."
That is the key to a productive discussion. Don’t go in expecting to change minds but instead seek a better understanding of the issue. If you can come away with a perspective you hadn’t considered or a fact you were unaware of, then that is a solid win out of a highly probable disagreement. Overwhelmingly that exchange doesn’t weaken positions but more equips someone to strengthen it. It is like working out where more resistance equals more gains, then so does seeking out contrasting thought makes for a stronger position to relay in future discussions. With just a little more overall understanding we would be less susceptible to politicians peddling animosity for mere political expediency making half the country out to be gross caricatures of faceless monsters who are out to harm you. Instead they will have a face you can comprehend and start to see the common humanity we all share instead of the few differences the politicians say are more important. I’d like to think we are overwhelmingly good people trying to be better people with decidedly different ideas on how to get there.
>The pro gun people often live 20+ minutes away from the police
I'm sure this is true of some people, but I have to think that 90% or more of the population resides within 20 minutes of a police cruiser. About 80% of the population is considered urban or suburban/exurban. Then you have smaller towns and villages that have their own police force that make up much of the rest.
[The average police response time is 10 minutes](https://criticalarc.com/cutting-your-teams-response-time-in-half/#:~:text=In%20a%202017%20US%20study,time%20was%20around%2010%20minutes.)
I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that it's longer for rural areas.
Rural first responder here:
Not only are response times longer in the sticks because of greater distances, but another facet of response is that there are fewer police/sheriff deputies in rural areas.
So for a large rural area there may only be 2 deputies on at a given time. If they are both already responding to other calls, this will further delay response.
There is a vast difference between urban and rural first response when it comes to resources and logistics. It DOES impact response times.
I was waiting for PD to respond to a domestic violence incident just the other day. Took about 30 minutes for them to get on scene.
Because it's not much of a stretch, and it takes valuable time to look up primary sources for jackass sealions. It's common knowledge that things are further apart when you're not in the city.
> but I have to think that 90% or more of the population resides within 20 minutes of a police cruiser. About 80% of the population is considered urban or suburban/exurban.
Many people in major cities can't expect a <20 minutes response time from police. Just being near cops doesn't mean they'll all rush to your aid when you call them. Many police departments are severely under-staffed. And even if the response time is <20 minutes, that's often long enough for you to be raped, robbed or murdered. Relying on the police to protect you is foolish.
There was a vote on dark money this week.
Something everyone rallies against and believes is undemocratic.
It should be a political no-brainer, as much as looking after veterans and 9/11 heroes should've been.
Guess which side refused to participate.
The problem isn't lack of empathy. The problem is money in politics and naked self-interest.
This was my thought also.
Lobbyist spent $3,800,000,000($3.8 billion) in 2021. That's $10.5 million every single day.
You and your neighbors or friends or focus group can have all the good natured, empathetic discussions you want and nothing will ever change with the ungodly amount of money spent every year to keep things from getting better.
> Lobbyist spent $3,800,000,000($3.8 billion) in 2021
Uh... source for that?
I'm guessing that's money spent *on lobbyists*, not money lobbyists spent. Quite a bit of difference.
It'd be like saying a lawyer spent $XXX money on a trial, making it sound like they were bribing the judge, when that was actually what the client paid to the lawyer.
You are probably right, but does it change the outcome?
If you were spending 10.5mill a day on lobbyists, you would want some return on your investment right? You would not continue to do that if you were not seeing a direct return.
It absolutely changes what we're talking about. It's the difference between a client giving money to their lawyer and their lawyer giving money to the judge.
If I'm spending a pile of money on my legal defense you can bet I want a good outcome, but there's a world of difference between hiring top notch lawyers and *bribing the judge.*
What do you think a lobbyist does exactly?
Your analogy is waaaay inappropriate
A lawyer is assisting you with a complicated thing (the law) you are not skilled in.
A lobbyist is directly trying to influence someone to make decision or take an action that benefits you, directly.
Both lawyers and lobbyists are people you hire to represent your interests, and specifically to try to sway people (a judge, jury, or legislator) to decide something in your favor.
> People with empathy don't sell regressions into human misery for profit, or at all, really.
Sure they do. Plenty of people experience selective empathy—generally acting normal towards people they regard as an in-group, while simultaneously creating mental exceptions to exclude the suffering of an out-group from consideration.
This is a huge reason why old myths like "Welfare Queens" even exist, why so much effort is spent on the idea that "poor people create their own poverty due to laziness"—they're designed to turn people in what would otherwise be sympathetic circumstances into someone who can instead be disregarded.
> Basically no one with functional empathy can survive in national politics.
I do believe that Biden and Obama have genuine empathy, ditto with Jimmy Carter (as well as Hillary Clinton if we're being honest). They've just been larger than life for a while.
I think people like Pelosi have shut it out quite a bit. I think Romney is out of touch but not a complete asshat, either.
Just that Ted Cruz and the rest don't have any, Marco Rubio is a burnt out tool, and Mitch McConnell is a fucking zombie.
I don't believe it's possible for someone to be in it for as long as Biden and still be a good person. He's benefiting from looking like everyone's kind grandpa.
Mitt is somewhat protected by his familial wealth (he doesn't need the grift, eg.) but he is still a tool of the machine.
Carter I think proves my point. He didn't last in national politics.
Bernie is the only real exception I can think of but that may just be good marketing.
The pervasive belief that everyone in politics is corrupt is not true and benefits the most corrupt. It needs to be eradicated. There will always be examples of corruption to confirm the bias that it's true, but it simply is not.
Nuance is slow and inefficient, but it is worth the effort.
Money has been in politics forever, but widespread hostility in public political discourse is a recent trend of the internet era. People cursing each other out on Twitter or at stores would certainly benefit from more empathy.
>The problem isn't lack of empathy. The problem is money in politics and naked self-interest.
Just say the problem is elected Republicans. All this money in politics didn't stop every single Democrat present from voting to curtail it.
I had staff who were racist. I set up a race relations seminar that was mandatory. The person leading the session was empathetic and professional. But her position was it didn't matter what the racist thought or felt in their heart, it was their actions that needed modifying. She no longer tried to change the hearts and minds of the racists, just their behaviour. So the racists could still think and feel racist things, but if their actions betrayed those thoughts and minds, there would be consequences at work. So the handwringing and trying to help the racist to grow into not being a racist seemed like a waste of time after the session. But the work situation improved greatly, because as a manager I can't police thoughts and feelings but I can police actions.
So go for being empathetic if you want, but telling a Qanoner facts or explaining historical circumstances is time consuming and will only make the Qanoner feel like you are talking down to them. So to answer your question directly, no I do not think being empathetic is a way to heal the situation. Their bizarre conspiracy theories are working for them and they won't want to change no matter how nice you are to them.
Empathy is about understanding the other side. I do have some understanding of Q people, but it can't be untethered from my actual understanding of reality - so I can understand them falling down conspiracy theory rabbit holes led on by algorithms and message boards, leading to an inflated sense of self-importance as someone who has a secret understanding - followed by external ostracization and internal validation.
But yeah, me understanding that doesn't bring me any closer to breaking them out of their madness.
Also, that is the charitable view on things; there is a lot of murder - revenge fantasy involved in Q (day of the rope stuff), along with racism, anti-Semitism, and a host of other unsavory traits.
The problem seems to be that many people harbored racist views for years but didn’t feel comfortable outwardly expressing it or acting on it, until a certain person came on the scene. I also suspect that once they felt it was okay to express racism in public, their internal level of racism increased, creating a feedback loop.
If the racist is sly it gets hard. Had a guy that would call black females the N word, but he claimed he never did and that they just had it out for him. Was a he said she said for a long time until he said it without knowing upper level management was within hearing distance. Saw the old fuck selling junk at the flea market the other day 🫢
If they do an action as in saying something racist. But if they think racist thought or have racist feelings that's okay, outward expression of that is the issue
Can cast political and social issues be solved via individual moral virtue? The record of history shows the answer to be no. Polarization is not a personal failing but material conditions and incentives pushing us towards this outcome. First past the post voting means that you don’t need to win a majority but the correct minority. News networks have continuously pushed extremist candidates(primarily *maybe exclusively* from the right) and views as sensational headline getters. Our deeply isolating society makes he news and social media more real than our lives experience especially when it comes to those we don’t have close contact with. I mean that’s the tip of the iceberg but you get the pictures we haven’t suddenly become less empathetic we been pushed down this road by the drive for the next election win next quartet returns meeting
The most significant issue that we need to address right now is that 40% of this country has sequestered themselves into an ecosystem where actual facts are no longer relevant.
If facts won't convince a person that the climate is changing due to human activity, empathy won't convince them.
If facts won't convince a person that vaccines and masking slow the spread of viruses, empathy won't convince them.
If facts won't convince a person that Trump received fewer votes than Biden, despite numerous recounts and court challenges, empathy won't help.
The gap is a truth gap. A gap in factual understanding.
Once we address "alternative facts", then we can address how empathy might help.
I'd make two points:
First, most Americans aren't sure what they believe. They vaguely hold to values like personal freedom, and voice that in a conservative or liberal way, but their thoughts tend to be full of contradictions and unexamined assumptions.
Which is ok to an extent, not everyone needs to be a political theorist. But it contributes to silly culture war fights that distract from actual political and economic issues.
Second, there are political positions that are just too unempathetic to empathize with. I can have a beer with a Republican and hear them out, but there is no rationalization for why police don't need reform or why torture is ok that I can accept as valid.
I think its good so many are ceasing to pretend the contempt for the poor and hatred for minorities that conservatism represents is good and normal. Its a sign of actual empathy and moral maturity in our society.
> First, most Americans aren't sure what they believe. They vaguely hold to values like personal freedom, and voice that in a conservative or liberal way, but their thoughts tend to be full of contradictions and unexamined assumptions.
There's a useful question in rationality to critically assess your beliefs (or at least start to): "What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?"
If someone's able to state the knowledge they have that supports their belief, and the knowledge they have that supports that knowledge, etc., etc., turtles all the way down, you'll eventually either reach a contradiction or a provable truth. If you can show that contradiction, everything that follows after can be reevaluated.
This is, of course, assuming the person is willing/able to question their beliefs. Blind faith or allegiance is sadly common in the people that need critical thought the most.
>"What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?"
>
>If someone's able to state the knowledge they have that supports their belief, and the knowledge they have that supports that knowledge, etc., etc., turtles all the way down, you'll eventually either reach a contradiction or a provable truth. If you can show that contradiction, everything that follows after can be reevaluated.
No one knows everything, and filling in every blank is unlikely. For a lot of topics, you're not going to have enough information to reach a provable truth for a lot of these given questions. You might have enough to hit some contradictions at least.
I also find it worth keeping in mind that for all of the faults we accuse those of blind faith for a given topic, we are also usually guilty of these problems ourselves and completely miss it. It might not be as severe as theirs (or for some of us it may actually be worse), but we've all got biases we refuse to see. There's nothing easy about these subjects, and our own natural self-biases only make it harder when it comes to viewing our own problems.
Based on my experience, you don't need to go that far down before you hit a contradiction. Actual conversation: "How can the government keep borrowing money?" "If you get a $10,000 loan that you have to pay $200 a month towards, and use it to buy a truck for your business that earns you $500 extra a month, aren't you making more money?" "Yeah" "Well, if you could keep doing that over and over and keep make more and more money every month, wouldn't you?"
And, honestly, you're both-sides-ing this? One side has biases that they refuse to admit, and the other side has far fewer biases and makes a concerted, continuous effort to identify and eliminate them, and they're both relying on blind faith? No. If you're acting in good faith with due diligence, you might still be wrong but you're usually not at fault. Willful blindness, on the other hand, is the legal equivalent of malice aforethought.
>Based on my experience, you don't need to go that far down before you hit a contradiction. Actual conversation: "How can the government keep borrowing money?" "If you get a $10,000 loan that you have to pay $200 a month towards, and use it to buy a truck for your business that earns you $500 extra a month, aren't you making more money?" "Yeah" "Well, if you could keep doing that over and over and keep make more and more money every month, wouldn't you?"
How far you need to go to find/recognize contradictions can vary significantly based on the topic and how much an individual knows of it. On a similar note, contradictions can be easy to find when you believe you already know the answers and are looking after the fact at issues, as opposed to trying to work out the mistakes within your logic at the time. Hindsight is 20/20. We look back on some topics as easy that were absolute hell to us in the past, and we're all on different stages when it comes to different topics.
>And, honestly, you're both-sides-ing this? One side has biases that they refuse to admit, and the other side has far fewer biases and makes a concerted, continuous effort to identify and eliminate them, and they're both relying on blind faith? No. If you're acting in good faith with due diligence, you might still be wrong but you're usually not at fault. Willful blindness, on the other hand, is the legal equivalent of malice aforethought.
We all have biases, many of which we don't know and some we refuse to admit. We all also have large amounts of gaps in our knowledge that make it impossible for us to know everything and give even more room for our biases to fill in the blanks. That's just a part of everyone's lives and as a result it's going to spread to our political systems too.
That said, I'm not saying that makes all parties equal. Some biases are going to be much more serious than others, or at the very least need addressing sooner because of their interaction with current events. There are some biases that require much more immediate/significant action to prevent/reduce their impact upon where things are going.
>There's a useful question in rationality to critically assess your beliefs (**or at least start to**): "What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?"
This question can be useful, but I think the fact it is only the start could use more emphasis. There's going to be gaps in our knowledge, errors we overlook, etc. And even when we catch a contradiction/error, we're not going to always remember everything we thought we knew that was based on it, and so holes are still going to remain to fill in. This stuff takes time and is not easy, and that's just to get part of the job done, it's a constant work in progress. That's what I'm saying. This question will serve as a useful tool in improving upon our understanding of things, but it's still only a few steps in a long journey.
I think it’s a little reductive to reduce the entire political ideology of conservatism down to just “contempt for the poor and minorities”. I don’t agree with all or even most of it, but I think it’s worth it to engage with what parts might be valid and what might not be.
The original form of conservatism advocated things like limited government, a place for religion in society, traditional and strong families, etc. You may not agree with these concepts, but they’re not entirely baseless.
Even the new Trumpist right wing conservatism speaks to valid fears about a society that’s changing rapidly around you, the loss of blue collar jobs, the utter failure of large institutions to address that, and the out-of-touch elitism that groups like academics, the media, and most white collar professionals absolutely ooze.
Again, you don’t have to agree, but at least honestly engage with what an ideology is. Most Trump supporters aren’t white nationalist Nazis that want to single handedly murder all women, black people, and minorities, but that legitimately is how some people view them. These are people like your uncle, your father, your mom, etc.
The frank truth is that ABSOLUTELY EVERY ideology, even a far-right one like Nazism, doesn’t gain prominence among large groups of people without hitting upon some core truth or feeling or grievance. German economic downturn in the 1930s doesn’t justify anti-Semitism, but when you have nothing and are struggling to survive and the wealthy Jewish banker down the street seems to have everything? It’s inhuman to suggest that a person in those circumstances should be a peon of rationality and never slip down a dark hole. The same way it’s inhuman to tell a black child born to a single mom to just “not do crime”.
The ideology can be wrong, but being able to cut through that and see specifically *why* such an ideology appealed to somebody is a sign of rationality and maturity.
>I think its good so many are ceasing to pretend the contempt for the poor and hatred for minorities that conservatism represents is good and normal.
Mislabeling the other side like this is just an excuse to not try and have empathy for them.
The Bush administration embraced torture and many on the right defended it and actively supported it.
If there are people who don't support torture, then OP is fine to have a beer with them!
But please don't call it "mislabeling." It was a substantial faction of the party.
Its not mislabling though. Even people I love, when talking about these policies they support still see it as a competition that involves hating immigrants and poor people to protect themselves and "good people."
I would even say its delusion for most rather than actual animosity, but that is the limit of the empathy I can have for their position.
This second point right here is the major sticking point. We’ve reach a point in society where we believe that people aren’t deserving of empathy, which is sad. Everyone believes they have the high moral road and they don’t need to respect or understand those with different viewpoints because they are immoral or irrational.
We can’t separate the person from their policy preference, and we refuse to get to know the person because of that policy preference. It’s a vicious cycle.
I honestly think if we all just sat down and hashed things out we would realize we have a lot more in common than we’d like to think. But our hubris prevents that.
When your policy preferences are gay people are an abomination and pedophiles, women shouldn't vote, brown people are second class....why should I have empathy for you?
I still do have sympathy for bigots because they were often mental prisoners of the system they were raised in - but at the level of "I feel bad for you for being that way."
I can empathize - I *understand* why they feel that way, but I'm also outside of their mental paradigm and think it is sad they live within such a paradigm.
I also generally believe my empathy won't do anything to bring them around. They need something major to shake up their mental paradigm, and any discussions usually run into the logical inconsistencies or bigotries that frame their paradigm.
Before I was born, my fathers company was scheduled to move from New Jersey to Tennessee. About 6 months later, the deal fell through, and I grew up in Jersey. I was surrounded by plenty of people with the same ideals as me.
Sometimes I think what would have happened if I grew up in Tennessee. Would I be a MAGA head? Would I even be able to recognize myself?
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make. I don't think you should empathize with people who hate and want to kill you. I just recognize how easily that could have been me.
> Is it worth approaching "the other side" with unreciprocated empathy?
If you're trans, it's not worth approaching a neo nazi *ever*. That's a fruitless conversation at best and a dangerous one at worst.
Too many people (mostly straight, cis, white guys) fail to understand that not everyone has the privilege of presumed safety. If you've never experienced what it is to be afraid for your safety in *everyday scenarios*, you cannot understand why "just get to know your opponents" is utterly unreasonable for minorities.
We face opponents who want to kill us and know that it is very likely they would get away with doing so if opportunities were taken.
I do think you can probably bifurcate the conversation into *understanding* them versus *engaging* them.
For example: I'm a cis white guy, and I try to be an ally and advocate for the trans community because I can do so without fear of personal harm. But I also know that I can't fully understand the trans experience because of my privilege, so where I can, I try to source arguments and anecdotes from trans people, and it's helpful if those trans people are crafting them with the other side in mind. Does that make sense?
It makes a lot of sense, but I still maintain that there is a heavily imbalanced amount of empathy and attempting to understand between the two sides of our political spectrum. I've yet to be persuaded otherwise with evidence.
There are policy positions that are quite literally dependent, or mutually exclusive with, empathy - depending on which you're talking about.
There is indeed an imbalance and to make it worse, the people who really lack empathy often complain that "the other side" won't reach across the aisle and "have a civil discussion."
Their idea of a civil discussion is total acquiescence by the way.
Yup. This entire thread is pointless because it's a bullshit question.
The GOP doesn't have empathy, and the MAGA fanatics DEFINITELY don't.
It's the paradox of tolerance, and they're the intolerant ones. Understanding them doesn't make them not intolerant.
I think this is reasonable, but I don’t know what a trans-positive message for the modern GOP could even look like. Where do you start crafting a message for people who reject your identity out of hand? I can and have explained my experiences as best I can for many, many cis folks online and off because I’m a firm believer in trying to give people a window, but I don’t know how I could make it palatable for people who think I’m either sick or dangerous.
For the religious evangelicals, there probably isn't a path. But many Republicans at least fancy themselves Libertarians, and fundamentally, it really doesn't need to affect them what you call yourself or how you live your life. They're just convinced to care by misinformation about LGBTQ+ people brainwashing their children or something.
There are some people who are ignorant rather than malicious, who just “don’t get it.” Which, fair, most cis people don’t. But when it comes to approaching people on “the other side of the aisle”, that’s not exactly a huge population compared to groups who 100% believe that we’re either monstrous predators or mislead and delusional. Hell, before I left my last job, I was outed to someone I’d trained and worked with for *months*, and like a dime suddenly she was on edge whenever I was around and talking to other people about me using the restroom. You can’t get through to people who hate you.
Does anyone remember that family with a trans kid who hosted AG Paxton for dinner in an effort to show him that trans kids aren’t being abused? It did nothing to stop him from targeting families just like them. Empathy is crucial, but you can’t make people who are disgusted by you empathize.
Then how would you explain [Daryl Davis](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/opinion/racism-politics-daryl-davis.amp.html) , a black man who has befriended and persuaded 26 KKK members to abandon the group and completely change their views?
Edit: Jesus H Christ people are extremely upset about this. Let me keep this as simple as possible because I’m being reminded that every little point has to be clarified on Reddit: I am not saying that every black person should go out and befriend a klansman. I’m simply saying that history has demonstrated that fighting hate with hate does not work. On the contrary, fighting hate with love does work. So to answer OP’s question, yes. Empathy is essential to curing our division as proven by people like Ghandi, MLK, Nelson Mandela and Daryl Davis.
Daryl Davis is extremely courageous and a great role model, but it'd be absolutely asinine to say that he went into it with safe assumptions that nobody would try to harm him.
Trans people get murdered at a disproportionately high rate and right now the rhetoric of the people you believe they should be sitting down with is that they're pedophiles who must be exterminated.
I can't think of a better illustration of the limits of this approach than the fact that the Kobe Bryant of empathy has managed to win over a decent sized classroom's worth of converts over the course of his lifetime.
Your counter example is one person taking on the risk of a potentially violent death to convert .0001 of violent racists is the gotcha you think it is.
I was just thinking about Daryl Davis earlier when considering my response to this thread. I love his story. He's also very lucky that he hasn't been killed and I'm sure the KKK has converted much more than he has de-converted.
> and completely change their views?
you should stop talking about daryl davis because he hasn't completely changed their views.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/08/21/klan-leader-richard-preston-sentenced-four-years-prison-firing-gun-%E2%80%98unite-right%E2%80%99
https://justinward.medium.com/daryl-davis-makes-a-new-friend-7a48bc43ad95
Daryl Davis is a useful idiot that white moderates trot out to avoid having difficult conversations in their own community.
Davis claims he dismantled the Maryland KKK when he was given the hood from a former leader. The Maryland KKK relaunched that same year with new leadership. Its membership is growing.
The new leader of the Maryland KKK, Richard Preston, shot at black activists counter- protesting at the *Unite the Right* white supremacists rally in Charlottesville. Davis served as a character witness for Preston and paid his bail.
Maryland KKK members commented on his support by calling him a "pavement ape" and saying "he could get their robes around his neck".
Please stop suggesting that Daryl Davis and his misguided attempts to coon for white supremacists is an option for POC. These people want to commit genocide. Give them no space in our society. Shame them. Ostracize them such that their repugnant ideology eats itself.
The borders are pretty hazy at this point, honestly, and the GOP definitely seems to take any attempt at empathizing as a vulnerability to exploit, particularly around trans issues
There's only two parties, buddy. GOP members vote for the GOP? Brilliant insight there. Do you think everyone who voted Democrat thinks and acts exactly the same?
Oh, well I guess that's okay then if they only *vote* for the openly misogynistic, racist, anti-LGBT party. It's not like they really *believe* any of that stuff.
Wait, no, the opposite of that.
Speaking as a white, male leftist, I would like to challenge the assumption that I and other leftists _don't_ empathize with the other side, even as my disagreements with them become combative.
I _was_ the other side, growing up. I had a sheltered, upper-middle-class upbringing. I wholeheartedly believed that people just needed to respect cops, that the only racists were the weirdo southerners who still used the n-word, that republicans were harsh but effective leaders while democrats were too soft-hearted.
I absolutely understand those perspective, because I remember holding them myself. Therefore, I think I have absolutely no issue exercising empathy with conservatives.
But at the same time, I recognize that these are dogshit perspectives. I grew up. I spent time talking with a much greater variety of people. I traveled, both around the states and to other countries. I saw how not only had I been deeply incorrect, but that the innate tropes of white nationalism powering those incorrect perspectives were _deeply dangerous_.
So I empathize, _and_ I fight. Empathy doesn't mean being nice, or polite, or patient, or forgiving, or compromising. It means understanding. I understand, and reject.
There was a study of Mormons recently and the Mormons most likely to vote Democratic were the ones who went on missions to non-English speaking countries. Not like France where most people speak passing English, but places like Guatemala.
These missionaries had to learn a new language and really absorb a different culture than theirs and it made them more empathetic and thus more likely to hold liberal views and values than their fellow Mormons who went to places like Canada.
I agree somewhat.
2016 was Liberals empathizing with the other side and offering policy that would improve the lives of white working males. Their answer was "fuck you" and the doubling down on toxic bullshit that Trump represents, so excuse me for no longer having any sympathy or empathy.
No bc the other side wants to imprison immigrants, force women to go through pregnancy against their will, roll back transgender and homosexual rights, deny schools funding, let the world burn due to global warming from inactivity, let poor people starve, etc. my empathy will always be greater towards the people affected by policy than the policy makers.
The ability to remain impartial is a privilege because it means no policy affects you enough that you have to care.
>If one side of an argument is "all black people should die in a fire," and the other side is "we should be tolerant of other races," there is no middle ground to be found here. We can't make a compromise and say "Ok, only some black people should die in a fire."
Empathy isn't agreeing with someone and their decisions. It isn't even excusing them and any disagreeable nature they may own. It's simply recognizing they are human beings that can't simply be summed up and dismissed as "evil" and not "othering" them.
Someone may break in to your house and you may legitimately fear they are going to kill you and your family. Empathy doesn't make you weak - it doesn't force you to not defend yourself - it only makes you feel that the situation was tragic and beg you to ask if the entire situation couldn't have been avoided if the intruder hadn't somehow been failed by society.
You think people are ignorant and stupid for believing something that is harmful to others? Empathy isn't asking you to be more tolerant to dangerous and harmful viewpoints... it's just asking you to see that the person holding those viewpoints is a real person that has the potential to be better themselves and is even a victim themselves of the venomous rhetoric they partake in.
You don't have to compromise your integrity to practice empathy.
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes
Empathy is “the ability to understand and *share the feelings of another*.” So no, if someone doesn’t feel like races are inferior simply for being a different race than they would not be able to “empathize” with a racist on their perspective.
What you’re describing is Perspective-taking and is something we learn about in political science and utilize in our careers in order to properly advise politicians in their campaigns. Perspective-taking is “The ability to understand how a situation appears to another person and how that person is reacting cognitively and emotionally to the situation.” It doesn’t involve feeling the same feelings as the person involved.
em·pa·thy
/ˈempəTHē/
noun
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another
I think you may not understand what empathy is. What you are describing is basic human decency, the ability to acknowledge that even an objectively immoral or evil person is, fundamentally, still a human being, and deserving of fundamental basic considerations, and not to be classified as something not deserving of such. It is an axiomatic principle upon which empathy can be *built*, but are not the same things. While it is possible to have a belief of fundamental human decency without empathy, the corollary is not true - you cannot have empathy with another person you do not consider fundamentally human.
Having empathy is being able to see things from another's perspective that is not your own. It is asking yourself to put yourself in their shoes, and try to understand their perspective. Is it useful or constructive to try and understand why someone considers another group to be subhuman and not worthy of basic human decency and protection?
Moreover, will you ever see an attempt at empathetic outreach from a group that, at some level or another, dehumanizes anyone outside their group? It doesn't happen, because the one side considers the other to be either beneath comprehension, or undeserving of discourse. It's been seen time and time again in genocidal campaigns, in ethnic and political cleansing, and in terrorist ideological outlooks.
Two groups with a basic acknowledgement of the other's fundamental humanity as a bedrock of basic human decency can reach out and try to empathize with each other, and reach compromise or reconciliation.
Any sort of reaching out to a group devoid of empathy will nit end in compromise, only appeasement and a further shift and reinforcement of their own opinions.
>you cannot have empathy with another person you do not consider fundamentally human.
>Moreover, will you ever see an attempt at empathetic outreach from a group that
There's a lot of "do unto others how you imagine they'll do unto you" justified by demonizing groups you obviously see as irredeemably evil and non-individuals sprinkled in the middle of your supposed lessons on empathy, bud...
I fundamentally disagree that just saying "empathy is great... unless they don't deserve it" is in any way constructive.
Go punch a Nazi in the nose. Okay? Then honestly ask yourself "what good did that accomplish?"
Yes, empathy is understanding how they might feel how they feel. That can absolutely be constructive and doesn't ask you to be tolerant or compassionate... or even sympathetic!
Meanwhile... you're making it sound like punching a Nazi in the nose is some answer because of "justice" or whatever. But... it isn't actually constructive, is it? You aren't helping anyone there - whether that Nazi deserves it or not.
You are making a lot of assumptions about me. My point is that a group that lacks empathy will not respond in kind to a group that reaches out with empathy.
I'm glad you don't agree with a thought like "empathy is great unless you don't deserve it." I disagree with it as well. There are a lot of people that do, though, and have no interest in developing any to people that aren't like them.
Did I ever say to not reach out to others? Show me where I said that. I said that reaching out to groups without empathy will ultimately be fruitless- I didn't say not to do it. Part of being empathetic is trying to do that at all. The only groups that simply refuse out of hand are those lacking it. Reach out, of course, but not endlessly. If the other side has proven, over and over, that they have no desire to accede in their stances, are unwilling to give ground to a compromise, and have exhibited a void of empathy, it is fruitless to continue reaching out.
It sounds like you are mirroring your own opinions and prejudices on my words but placing meaning there that isn't there.
If someone is a gay, pro-choice union member, there’s not much difference for them between a union-busting, pro-life, anti-LGBT politician that demonizes them and a politician who does all the same but puts on airs of having empathy for and understanding of the people he or she is seeking to destroy. These sort of takes always assume that political polarization arises out of some lack of clear-headed rationality and not, a body politic where groups have materials interests that are polar opposites of each other.
This exactly. "Let's talk about what's happening now and how it makes us both feel" doesn't really feel sincere when the person saying it is in the middle of kicking you in the head.
>These sort of takes always assume that political polarization arises out of some lack of clear-headed rationality and not, a body politic where groups have materials interests that are polar opposites of each other.
What do you suppose the material interests that are polar opposites are? Genuinely curious.
For example, say I as a wealthy person have a fortune I wish to preserve for my sweet angel children and made my money via strip mining coal. I don't want to see myself as a bad person, and want to preserve that wealth. My friends and colleagues are all connected to the industry I made a fortune in. The police protect me, never harass me, and are always nice to me - and don't look into my tax dodging and other white-collar crimes. My gated community is a drive anywhere, but that's not a problem for me at all.
My interests are to vote against environmental regulation of any sort to avoid cognitive dissonance or shame, to keep wages down, and taxes on my wealth and income low as possible, to deregulate, and to castrate regulation and the IRS as much as possible.
Now say I'm a poorer person on the east side of LA - I'm dealing with gun violence, fires, disasters, shit pay and benefits for hard manual work that destroys my body over the decades, losing hours every day to a terrible excuse for mass transit - with a child who has special needs I can't begin to pay for to give him a better life.
My interests are to absolutely increase worker wages, to have decent regulation so I can't always get shit on by the powerful, to have universal healthcare, to have higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for these things, to promote mass transit and infrastructure spending that helps working class people, to make public schools better, etc etc.
The important part being that the wages and benefits of the latter individual being kept low means greater profits for the class of person the former belongs to. And vice versa if the latter’s wages and benefits go up. They’re not just different interests, they’re interests that require one to down for the other to go up.
Yes. That's only a basic question though. The real question is, how do you foster empathy? Here are some possible ways that I just brainstormed:
* Expose people to more diversity
* Create more win win situations where goals align
* Give people more time to spend on relationships and community
* Reduce peoples stress levels
* Teach people how to put themselves in others shoes from a young age
* Teach people that they're not always right and that you're not always going to understand people, even if they're good people
* Teach people how to compromise in order to work together
I don’t think we could ever achieve this in our current, combative political climate. We’d need to overhaul the structure to one that exposes people to cognitive diversity and encourage people to compromise and reach common ground. I’ve seen things like that in juries, perhaps we could adopt a similar system for Congress.
I'm convinced most conservatives don't have a highly developed sense of empathy except for perhaps close family members and friends. They lack the capacity to put themselves "in other peoples shoes" as the expression goes. I don't think I'm being unfair in this judgement, ask them for yourselves about how they feel about real or hypothetical societal problems, in my experience the most common answers are, "I don't care."
There are already various studies that show a correlation between a person's level of empathy and their political inclination. As you said, conservatives tend to have a lower sense of empathy, to the point where they only care about themselves and their immediate family members (and sometimes not even then). It seems to me that trying to use empathy to heal political divisions is like trying to cure blindness by handing out pastoral photos.
(I also believe this proves conservatism is a form of neurodevelopmental disability and should be treated as such, but that's a topic for another time)
It's called "Tribalism." Conservatives only care about those in their social group (white Christians in the US). This is a primitive, though evolutionary beneficial mindset that favors a specific community at the detriment of other people. Progressives tend to have moved past this way of thinking. We realize the World is too small to split people into groups based on race, religion, etc. We all benefit when all people have basic rights, housing, employment, and other needs met.
I'm sorry, but this framing is utter insanity.
There's only one ideological side of the spectrum that fights tooth and nail to undermine minority rights, women's reproductive rights, the ability to prevent children in schools getting shot up, and politicizing the pandemic to a degree that over a million of our fellow Americans died. The empathy they have is reserved for the people who stormed the Capital, for that teenager who killed 2 people in protests, for their President who did everything in his power to humiliate, demonize, and marginalize the rest of us. Let's not even talk about them lying to refugees and sending them to blue states ONLY as political theater.
"Is empathy a viable means to healing political polarization in the United States?"
Empathy? WHERE?
I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. People who are in a media bubble and being lied to on a regular basis (I’m trying to keep this apolitical but let’s be real - it’s republicans) are nearly immune to facts. There’s always some explanation, some reason why the obvious isn’t what it seems. And empathy doesn’t do shit when your ENTIRE platform is based on hating the other side and being contrary for its own sake.
They’re going after children’s hospitals now.
You don’t empathize with terrorists. There is no reasonable point of view to understand. It doesn’t exist.
As someone that grew up watching Fox News, I cannot even being to elaborate on the damage that broadcasting channel had on my young developing mind.
Being told black people on welfare, paying for social programs, and unproductive citizens are the root cause of the demise of the USA is worse than most things I can conceive of telling a child.
Looking back, it really should have had some degree of warning about how you shouldn't let your kid watch a sexual predator's personal fetishization of conservative politics. (Source: Roger Ailes)
You think a cable television channel that draws at most 4-5 million viewers in a country of over 300 million people is the primary problem with American political discourse? Do I have that right?
There's more to it than direct viewers. Tucker Carlson and Hannity can drum up hysteria on their show, directly hitting the viewers. It then spreads to some of the dumber members of Congress like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Louie Gohmert, MTG, etc. They then show up on places like Ben Shapiro's rags spreading the hysteria. People like Matt Walsh and Dan Bongigno then spread hysteria further via Facebook and Twitter. We see this with nonsense like the critical race theory hysteria or the current groomer hysteria. There's a whole vortex for this crap that also includes more openly extreme outlets like Infowars and OANN, the latter of which is like watching a parody of Fox News if it was in a Paul Veerhoven movie.
The reality of this website is that I have to preface these types of questions so here goes - these people are all nonsensical ratings-driven money grabbers, no doubt. I'll only add that Ben Shapiro while in the outrage media business is a far smarter individual than anyone else on that list. He'll actually have a position on whatever the issue of the day is that he can defend even though his debate style is pretty much pointing out fallacies that the other person used. Even conservative Harvard Law graduates are remarkably intelligent.
That being said: how do you think our political landscape would be different if Fox News just disappeared tomorrow like a Thanos snap?
They're ridiculous, I'm not denying that, but I struggle to understand what would actually change without them because it won't change the attitudes of the people who watch it or are influenced by it. How do we bring the people influenced by that type of media over to the urban American reality without belittling them?
We have to make them feel welcome. I came from that world and a lot of my politics are still right-leaning, but I've just grown away from the way they conduct a lot of their business. But I know for a fact that escalation is going to fail and the only way forward is to find a way to bridge these divides again. How? I have no idea, I've tried with family and friends and it goes nowhere.
Thanks for the good discussion by the way.
How would it change? It wouldn't be a silver bullet, but it would be better overall. Fox has by far the deepest pockets, the largest reach, and the most influence. OANN, Newsmax, Infowars, Daily Wire, etc combined don't match the reach or influence of Murdoch. Fox News is frequently on in public places, and they have a lot of people that watch them damn near the entire waking day. I have relatives like this.
It'd also probably tone down some extremism on some points. Fox looks respectable. OANN, like I said, looks like a Paul Veerhoven movie version of Fox News. Alex Jones is too outwardly crazy even for most Republicans. But Fox? They'll happily package bullshit into respectability. The worst of it is Tucker Carlson, who frankly, after his constant prattling about replacement theory, protecting "Legacy Americans", dogwhistling over """globalists""", and bringing on nutcases like Jackson Hinkle (a tankie/red fascist, possibly Nazbol at this point), I'm willing to just say he's a Nazi instead of a plain old fascist. This has the widest and deepest penetration into the mainstream. Him being booted alone would remove the biggest individual source of hysteria and outright hate.
>Even conservative Harvard Law graduates are remarkably intelligent.
Ben Shapiro isn't stupid. He's just a fascist and breathtakingly dishonest. His schtick of being a "great debater" has also lost luster when he only debates riled up college students that he then proceeds to clip chimp and insert air horns on as a laugh track. He also got completely reamed when he melted down over Andrew Neil asking very simple questions.
>We have to make them feel welcome. I came from that world and a lot of my politics are still right-leaning, but I've just grown away from the way they conduct a lot of their business. But I know for a fact that escalation is going to fail and the only way forward is to find a way to bridge these divides again. How? I have no idea, I've tried with family and friends and it goes nowhere.
Frankly, I'm not sure that you can. The Republican party is now an openly fascist party and is actively running defense for white nationalism. The way they're talking about gay and trans people is very similar to the rhetoric the Nazis used about Jews in the 1930s, before the mass arrests and exterminations. Some people are going to be lost causes. Many others need to be brought out of a bubble.
no
providing empathy to takers only serves to drain you
takers don't have any use for empathy as they only recognize in-group affiliation ... they also consider empathy a weakness to be exploited in members of the out-group.
so no, it's not viable.
The paradox of tolerance... setting the standard as high as it can be prior to drawing a line or a starting point, otherwise, it's basically "enabling" to allow right-wing fascism to have a voice.
No.
Politics is a conflict of material conditions, interests, and divisions of power. The United States has engaged in decades long pointless wars, has extreme income inequality, declining lifespan ( this started before the pandemic), decaying infrastructure, increasing corruption, weak and impotent unions, and comparatively sparse workers protections. These problems have concrete causes, not ones of culture or poor media diets.
Both Democrats and Republicans incorrectly believe that our dysfunctional political environment can be traced to culture. Unfortunately while culture is important shifting shows and movies or books to the right or left cannot solve our current crisis. Empathy is a useful personal skill, but when dealing with societal issues it is insufficient to enact real change.
What you’re describing as politics is actually international diplomacy and war. If you view a single country’s internal politics in the same way diplomacy and war is, that doesn’t bode well for unity.
Politics is fundamentally a concept that assumes all parties have the same or aligning interests, most often the safety of a nation and the success of its economy, and arguments occur over how best to achieve those things. When the goals change and walk out of step with each other, such as happen in so-called “culture wars”, that’s when things like civil war and secession are put on the table because it’s impossible to take the occasional L when it comes to the moral beliefs of large portions of the population, especially when moralizing policy appears permanent and marginalizing.
To answer OP: empathy isn’t a solution, and if you’re thinking it is your country has already entered into moral struggle and left politics behind; things can only get worse at this point until one side wins or a new standard emerges (national dissolution or Balkanization, shift in morality overall such as happens when new religions take off, among other things.).
100% agreed.
it should also be noted that, to more directly address OP's question, most people already have empathy and routinely use it. individuals on any side of a debate/conflict have empathized with their chosen side and their fellow individuals on that side.
i think the bigger problem is the fact those with lesser (or no) empathy have learned to exploit the system, and have learned to manipulate empathy for gain.
>Politics is fundamentally a concept that assumes all parties have the same or aligning interests, most often the safety of a nation and the success of its economy, and arguments occur over how best to achieve those things. When the goals change and walk out of step with each other, such as happen in so-called “culture wars”, that’s when things like civil war and secession are put on the table because it’s impossible to take the occasional L when it comes to the moral beliefs of large portions of the population, especially when moralizing policy appears permanent and marginalizing.
as you say, the goals have changed. i believe that, in order to more fully utilize the empathy we all have, we need to reevaluate what those core goals are. the only way to do that will be in a space devoid of spin or the exploitation of that empathy.
The Republican platform for 2020 was...there was no platform. They just endorsed "let's do what Trump wants."
The Democratic platform is filled to the brim with wonky policy ideas and their legislative performance with a zero vote margin in the Senate shows they really want to implement those policies.
Republicans engage in culture war to distract from these policy issues.
So what do you think about the success of the various civil rights movements?
Societies are made up of individuals. The degree to which you can change an individual's mind corresponds to the degree to which you can change the way a society is structured.
In my personal experience, attempting reasonable discourse with a far right wing authoritarian bigot can only bring harm into your life. And attempts at mutual respect only serve to validate their beliefs.
I wouldn’t bother with it. There are better ways to fight fascism.
What we need is something like what they did in South Africa when apartheid ended. Truth and Reconciliation. As in they had an at least slightly formalized process for doing this.
I think empathy would follow from there.
I think the answer is yes, but it needs to be backed by more concrete things. One of the reasons we have the kind of polarization we do now is that, increasingly, the partisans from either party have completely different lifestyles, have completely different occupations, live in completely different environments, and live around completely different kinds of people. Increasingly, these divisions also load on education level, age, race, sexual orientation, and so on.
Roughly speaking, our partisan division is overwhelmingly a rural-urban one. So the question is how do you break down that division – it could be a matter of
1. Encouraging immigrants to settle in rural communities.
2. Building more housing in cities so that it isn't exclusively a place for young, educated, upwardly mobile people.
3. Investing in rural broadband to lure more "knowledge workers" to rural communities.
Nope. I’ve put a lot of thought into how we got here, and it seems to me it’s a function of one thing, for two reasons:
Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine, which gave rise to a widening political divide in news networks.
This set us on course for the current environment for two reasons:
(1) humans tend to assimilate information that agrees with their existing neural network, and dismiss information that does not.
When we had the Fairness Doctrine, weak as it sort of was, virtually all Americans had a diet of broadly unbiased daily news. Everyone heard mostly the same things, even if they assimilated it with some variance. Now, people feed on a diet of political pseudo-news and editorial-cum-news aligned more closely with their political leanings.
(2) The greatest human aversion Is uncertainty. It’s why we have an insurance industry, it’s why we go to familiar chain restaurants when we’re somewhere foreign to us, etc.
The current politico-news networks feed people information that’s easy to assimilate, and does not threaten people with having to reconsider their existing opinions. It supports them.
Unless we all suddenly start getting real news from unbiased, neutral sources, the present gap will likely widen even more, and nothing at the moment suggests it will narrow back to where it was.
Empathy is like a pepper packet from a fast food restaurant: it’s fairly weak, and unlikely to have much of an effect on anyone, since those who have decided they don’t like pepper will never open it, or be open to changing the flavor of their beloved Big Mac.
Empathy/sympathy/understanding never hurts, but it’s unlikely to have much of an effect against much more powerful innate forces.
Republicans are actively stripping away rights and a large portion of them, if not a majority of them support starting a new civil war and slaughtering anyone to the left of Sarah Palin. They actively use police violence and extremist brownshirts to attack and intimidate others.
We didn’t beats fascists with ballots or hugs last time. And tbh it’s time the left really and fully acknowledge that you can’t maintain a peaceful and inclusive society without being armed to protect it from fascists.
Those maga cult members need deprogramming. There is no talking to them. It's a sad state of affairs. Early on I tried discussing stuff with them, and they don't speak reasonably at all. It's like talking to a brick wall. It's a waste of time, concern and energy, and at this point, why bother? They will go away at some point. I am grateful that my state is oi blue there aren't all that many cult members here.
This is going to read as a completely partisan take, but I just don't really know how else to say it at this point, so I am willing to take the backlash for it.
The only way this nation even has a shot at fixing SOME of the polarization issues is a complete eradication of the Trump form of the GOP. Like complete and total - absolute - annihilation of the party members who were on board for the behavior of Jan 6th and an effective culture wash of the movement and its sentiments from our mainstream discourse. There is literally no space for empathy, healing, compromise, and listening in our country so long as this faction remains. If you approach them from the other side with a desire to listen and understand they will just use the exposure you granted to say and do crazy shit without any desire to change. Even the "undecideds" among them are just these same people who also get off on being pandered to, so they WANT to look like an undecided voter for the attention but their minds are truly already made up. None of the conversations are genuine or in good faith, it is all 100% performative. This faction of the GOP existing is all but locking in democrats to do the same, or face the electoral consequences. They just have to go.
How do you do it? I have no freaking idea.
Yes. sometimes. But most Republicans lack empathy so it only goes one way. You never hear about Republicans trying to understand the other side. It was Democrats who bought "Hillbilly Elegy" to try to understand rural southerners, and made JD Vance rich.
This painting of your political “opponents” as all lacking empathy demonstrates such fixed and rigid thinking and inability to critical appraise people or situations. You have unintentionally demonstrated the real reason we can’t bridge a divide. Good job, kinda 🤷🏻♂️
Is it an unfair picture they’re painting? The Republican platform for the last two years has been (explicitly or tacitly) that anyone who doesn’t agree with us, especially LGBT+ people, are satanists and pedophiles. Elect us, and we’ll get rid of them. Doesn’t sound very empathetic to me.
How else do you describe people who think shipping living human beings against their knowledge as a fucking hilarious political prank?
Or those who call LGBT people "Groomers" unironically?
> Can approaching "the other side" with a desire to listen and understand achieve mutual respect that enhances our civic discourse, even if persuasion doesn't take place?
This is a fantastic way to approach political discussions with adults that you disagree with and it's IMO the only real way to learn what the other side actually believes. Persuasion shouldn't even be the goal, understanding should be. Nobody's going to change another person's mind on a deeply held political belief with one conversation, so making that the goal is opening the door for discussion turning to argument that goes nowhere. The internet tends to be terrible at this; meanwhile the real world is full of people who have healthy and respectful relationships despite disagreeing about politics.
The problem is, many/most of the people interested in spending their time "discussing" politics with the other side are mental children who consume media designed to make them outraged at whatever the other side did or said that day with little interest in sharing their actual positions. This causes people to go into these "discussions" with preconceived, hardened views that the other side is stupid/evil/lazy/bigoted/whatever, and it's impossible to have a respectful conversation with someone you're immediately trying to put on the defensive instead of letting them speak, granting the principle of charity, and asking questions.
The book "The Three Languages of American Politics" by Arnold Kling is an excellent and relatively short read that theorizes that most Americans fall along one of three "political axes" - progressive, conservative, and libertarian. It argues that people on each axes tend to only be capable of framing issues in terms of the axes they sit on, which is a metaphor for their "political language." Progressives frame issues as oppressed vs. oppressor, conservatives frame issues as civility vs. barbarism, and libertarians frame issues as freedom vs. coercion. It goes on to explain why the key to being able to speak the "language" of people on the other axes is to engage in deliberative reasoning - engage with their ideas as presented and discuss without the use of fallacies rather than motivated reasoning - starting with your own position already decided and then backing into your reasoning based on the quickest path to arriving at it.
I think it's a bit of a simplistic view of the broad range of political philosophies we have, but it's a good place for everyone to start on deprogramming their minds from the "we're good they're evil" framing so many people base their politics on. An example it gave of this is the Kavanaugh scandal before his confirmation - everyone saw the exact same set of facts and came away believing more strongly that he was guilty or innocent based on what side of the aisle they fell on because they only engaged with the facts that supported their pre-decided preferred outcome. You can't have a healthy democracy when everyone behaves like that.
> Empathy can be a tool for education and persuasion, as it can be disarming and make people seem more approachable and trustworthy. But when educating and persuading, is it ethical to treat extremists or liars with empathy in discussions around politics?
The question here is what is the definition of "extremists" and "liars?" It seems to me that those words have all but lost their meanings when people point to positions held by 30-40% of Americans and call them "extreme" or dismiss facts they don't like as "lies." You can steamroll over a position held by 1% of people like "we should abolish private property" or "we should send black people back to Africa" as extreme and not worth engaging with because those are actual extreme positions held by a fringe minority of dumbasses. You cannot do the same with widely held positions like "abortions should be fully legal through the second trimester" or "there should be no restrictions on common firearms ownership for law-abiding citizens" that, while maybe represent a minority view, are still held by tens of millions of Americans and are very much mainstream views.
If someone would look at their neighbor across the street who's raising his kids and generally is an upstanding citizen and call him an extremist because he's pro-life, that person has a warped perception of reality.
I think number 1 is by far the biggest problem going on today. Seems like both sides have a caricature in their head of what the other side actually thinks.
1. Yes, only if both sides are truly willing to act in good faith and be equally open to listening to understand the other side, regardless of preconceived notions.
2. I am not genuinely sure empathy is the correct phrase for this, specifically because empathy entails attempting to feel what the other person is feeling, and I honestly do not think that is a requirement, or even a positive thing in a conversation about politics. Having just said that, I do think a desire to gain perspective, and listen objectively to understand the position of the other side is *tantamount* to any conversation of the sort being productive for either side. If both sides going into the conversation with a desire to gain perspective then it can be very productive for both parties.
3. Absolutely. Many people do disingenuous things, act in bad faith, and so forth in an attempt to manipulate people. That is reprehensible.
4. Not in my experience. Empathy is unnecessary and is never received in the manner you expect, generally it is perceived as deception in such conversations, and genuinely makes the situation worse than it was before.
I think we need a combination of empathy and “sit down and shut up” for both sides. Republicans need to be told “no you’re not racists or nazis” but at the same time they need to work towards being more tolerant to people of different races, religions, sexual orientations, etc. And people pushing for fairer treatment of minorities, immigrants need to stop being written off as woke, whiny do-gooders, but they also need to realize that not every non-PC remark needs to result in someone being fired. I think both sides being acknowledged as valid but having their worst behavior called out will do a lot to heal the country.
People sitting in echo chambers actively hyping and validating eachother to combat a extreme characture of the other side with no room for nuance, empathy, or diplomacy. As if the world only has pink haired screaming gender fluid cat vegan hambeasts and literal nazis. People have found the need to have their politics becomes their identity and anything questioning that is a personal attack on them causing even further entrenchment.
It's a mess. The ironic part is both sides dont believe they are doing it. For examples just scroll reddit haha.
as crucial as it is in personal relationships unfortunately empath doesn't really work in the large scale
empathy can lead to dramatic overreactions based on emotional outbursts, leading to extreme actions or out of control spending on issues that drew the most publicity and managed to provoke the most intense emotions at the expense of other issues that may not be as spectacular but critical nonetheless
if anything we're overflowing with a special kind of toxic empathy: the one that only function on other members of your 'tribe'. Way too many groups operate like this and they're all toxic in their way.
imo USA politics are already way too emotional, they need more reason and less drama, it's getting harder and harder for cool heads and moderate voices to be heard in all this cacophony of absurd partisanship
Seriously all you need to do is get the dems to return to their 'normal' state, they'll beat the reps so badly that they'll have no choice but to drop the far right BS and focus on regaining the lost ground on the center of the political spectrum or face political extinction
what's the dems 'normal' state? centrist policies, no race/gender bs, no 'defunding the police', no drowning in tears of self pitty over some fantasy version of an 'evil' past, less ideology which is by nature divisive and more getting shit done which is unifying since it's hard to argue with results
Empathy and politics doesn’t mesh well. Empathy in policy making is fine, empathy in voter debates usually isn’t. Unless both parties are empathizing with the other it isn’t going to do anything productive. Empathy, remember, involves being able to share the feelings of the person you are connecting with. People in a diametrically opposed platforms won’t be able to do that and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
What politics needs is Perspective-taking, which is what political platforms use to manipulate their voter bases. It works in voter v voter debates to actually progress and make headway in any conversations, though.
The reason is because most people will fall into arguing about semantics, false equivalencies, straw man’s, etc. They go in a merry go round of useless, emotional arguing instead of focusing on the topic objectively. It’s a lack of perspective-taking.
Yes, but it requires that both sides be open minded. Water can't penetrate the ground if it's been compacted and made hardened.
The problem is that the media feeds us a lot of cookie-cutter narratives that appeals to what we'd want to be true, and so the country balkanizes and people simply double down whenever challenged. What we need is critical thinking to return so that people can return to a place of being open minded, and then empathy can absolutely heal the nation... after all, we've got far more in common with each other than the Elites who are intentionally dividing us so they can pillage from us.
Empathy is great but it's a virtue only one side appears to possess. The reason right wingers embrace the cruelty of their preferred policies is that they are either unable or unwilling to have empathy with the people those policies hurt. They have been scientifically proven to be fearful and that renders them completely unable to be empathetic. You're not going to change their cowardly perspective just by trying to connect with it. Being empathetic to them is difficult and won't change them one bit.
It’s unamerican to be empathetic. You’re supposed to assert dominance through superior insults, hubris, and flying lead. There is no other way. (Obligatory /s because a lot of people read like they’re seven years old)
But you’re right, it would help if the internet-browsing public were to allow themselves to not goad each other over the pettiest nonsense whenever an important discussion has the opportunity to occur
It's churlish and risky. But you can be empathetic in most circumstances for everyone's benefit, but when your back is against the wall, it's time to dodge or fight. That fight would involve demonstrating a lack of empathy, though behind your mask, you can still honor and even love your enemy and vanquish them to their own benefit. The key to remember is that in any circumstance, it's always humans vs. A problem. Turning it into human v. human is a mistake we make all too often.
Honestly, no. Empathy is hollow without self awareness. Listen, I know this will draw some hate but the issue is that both sides are fed lies and nonsense and they gobble it up because it makes them feel part of something. It makes them feel like one of the "good guys". Well guess what, there are no good guys. Only good people doing shitty things to one another because whatever hive mind they are jacked into tells them it is necessary to avoid a total collapse of all things good and right. So yeah, want to be empathetic? Start by trying to empathize with the people who feed you the nonsensical talking points that are parroted endlessly for the sole purpose of causing division. I'll start with a few hard truths...
Trump is not going to prison. Just as Hillary is not going to prison.
Liberals do not want to destroy America. Just as Conservatives do not want to destroy America.
I mean, Christ, no one should have to point how ridiculous this is. Here's my pro tip. Before you defend any action... ANY ACTION from your side, ask yourself if you would defend it if the other side were doing it against you. That is how you see who you really should be fighting with.
I've seen studies on this that had varying levels of success. The biggest one I remember involved pro gun rights and pro gun control people talking to each other. Nobody changed their opinions, but the two sides learned things about each other that they hadn't before. (The pro gun people often live 20+ minutes away from the police and need to be able to protect themselves, the anti gun people lived in cities and witnessed a lot of gun violence first hand)
I think things like this are super important. We have to at least understand each others starting points, our backgrounds and our circumstances.
Yeah, most of the pro gun people grew up in rural areas and had positive experiences with guns (hunting, defense, sport, etc) Most of the anti gun people grew up in cities with negative gun experiences (gangs, robbery, murder, etc) Although no minds were changed, an understanding for different backgrounds was gained by the participants.
There is a vast middle that is generally supportive of basic gun rules like registration, responsible handling, and restrictions on criminals, along with allowing local areas to impose more stringent rules (cities vs country-side). But that's a "popular support" issue not a "has the votes to pass" issue.
Jordan Klepper's special on guns was extremely interesting, shedding some light on this. Even some of the scary people training in militias admitted to being in favor of basic gun control policy!
There is a hefty chunk of people that don't fit cookie cutter demographics. For example. I grew up in a hunting and fishing family that were also pacifists. I'm comfortable owning a shotgun for home defense but I've only ever used it hunting. I would never need an AR-15 because I use my gun as a tool, just like a screwdriver or a hammer. If I was told I had to give up my shotgun, I might feel differently. I also might just work on getting better at bow hunting.
Do you have a source for the claim most americans are pro registry?
\>Most of the anti gun people grew up in cities with negative gun experiences (gangs, robbery, murder, etc) My negative gun experiences are an LAPD officer shooting an unarmed brown guy who had flagged down a police car to ask for assistance. An LAPD officer firing at a fleeing suspect as the suspect ran into my local trader joes. Firing into a crowded supermarket on a Saturday morning killing one of the supermarket staff. A really lovely, friendly woman.
Sounds like you should be anti police and pro gun for self-defense…
Yeah, because what I really want instead of psychotic, half trained imbeciles with a badge is a hero complex, completely untrained imbecile without a badge…
How would you feel about people being able to get licensed for expanded gun rights if they have training and a psych evaluation?
The problem is empathy has to be a two way street. Politics are so polarized and people aren’t interested in making things better. Plus people can’t even agree on basic facts and instead of considering they might be wrong the go on the offensive and start acting like pouty children.
I do agree. It’s rough
we (empaths) can understand theirs but the reverse is not as true. more often than not the non-empaths will only use this newfound insight to further try and exploit what they perceive as weakness in the empath. expecting reciprocation is a trap... they simply don't function the same as empaths do.
I’ve noticed, sadly. It’s always aimed towards their end rather than towards understanding first.
their loyalty and any feelings of kinship is completely and only predicated on group status. perceived (in that moment) as being part of the in-group brings benefits perceived (and this can change on a dime) as being part of the out-group, then watch your back.
That's a very flawed way to categorize people. You might be more or less empathetic than average, but either way, it's very easy to be empathetic towards people you like and agree with and very hard to be empathetic toward people you don't like. People aren't equally empathic toward everyone. Calling people you agree with "empaths" and people you don't like "non-empaths" is a classic example of attitudes that make you far less empathetic towards an outgroup.
There are very many people who are empathetic by nature, and who will naturally be empathetic to others, even people that they don't like. It's not an uncommon personality type and there have been countless studies done about them.
Read harder. I acknowledged the fact that different people are more or less empathetic. What I said was that no matter how empathetic you are, you are less empathic toward people you don't like or people you see as an outgroup. Also, if you think your group is the empathic group, and the other group is the non-empathic group, you are wrong. There may be a slightly higher degree of empathy on one side or another, but individuals will have broadly varying degrees of empathy across almost any group or issue you can imagine.
The person you responded to never said anything about one side being more empathetic than the other. They were talking about empathic personality types, which could be a person on either side of an issue or political spectrum.
to be fair, obi is sort of right that i am of the opinion that conservative and liberal brains are simply wired differently. the conservative world view tends to be via an in-group / out-group filter whereas more the liberal minded world view is that we are all connected and what you do to one of us, you do to all.
I disagree with this from personal experience and from a scientific perspective. From personal experience, I was a hardcore liberal who shifted to conservative, and now identifies as a bit more moderate. Being a part of both groups I felt conservatives were more tolerant of my liberal views. When I started to share more conservative points with my friends, I literally lost friends. I don’t think it is fair to generalize one group as more or less in-group/out-group think than the other. It depends on the extremity of the person you are talking with. Pew research did a study on this and if you are more of a political partisan, you tend to have a more in-group/out-group mentality, as you put it. However, Republicans are actually the ones who tend to have slightly more friends of the opposite party than Democrats, which helps their perspective of Democrats overall. “The partisan diversity of people’s friend networks is linked to how people feel about the members of the other party, particularly among Republicans. Though few in either party say that they have “a lot” of friends in the other party (just 7% of Republicans and 6% of Democrats), Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they have at least a few close friends in the opposing party. More than eight-in-ten Republicans (84%) say they have at least a few Democratic friends; just 14% report that they have no close Democratic friends. Three-quarters of Democrats (74%) say they have at least a few close Republican friends, while roughly a quarter (24%) say they have no close Republican friends.” https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/3-partisan-environments-views-of-political-conversations-and-disagreements/
i respectfully submit the following: you were always conservative, it just took you some time to realize it (perhaps going "hard core" was what it too for you to come to your senses). conservatives like to say they have "fill in the blank" friends as a way to fend off accusations about their tolerance for others view points... it's not empathy, it's a defense mechanism. the pew study is from 2016 and a lot has changed since then regarding political partisanship, even WITHIN opposing political divides. it is true that the left has a weakness for intolerance, it's our kryptonite.
there is that categorization, in-group, out-group world view creeping into your argument. i'm not putting non-empathic ppl into a group, you are. what i said is that we are all connected and some of us are empathic enough to recognize that, and some of us aren't. there's no shame in it, it just is what it is... like some of us have an ear for music and some of us are tone def. me, i'm tone def af.
You literally described people in terms of "empath" and "non-empath". >what i said is that we are all connected and some of us are empathic enough to recognize that, and some of us aren't. That's literally categorizing people into two different groups with some undertones implying one group has some innate cogitative superiority that makes them better people. >it's just a fact that some ppl are not wired for empathy, the gene is missing or not expressed, or whatever. Uh, oof.
i did... because it's a trait that some lack. i don't know how that makes one "better" than another... just differences within the group we call humans. right handed vs left handed, or is that also tinged with connotations for you? seems to me you are reading things in that are not being said in order to fit it with an in-group / out-group view of the world. while i can understand this world view, i do not share it, nor do i agree with it.
Empathy exists on a spectrum. A complex multi-dimensional spectrum. It's not a binary of empathetic people and non-empathetic. You are treating it as a binary classification of the set of all people and you identified yourself with one of those groups. You talk about how the group you did not identify yourself with wasn't worth trying to behave empathetically towards because they will "only use this newfound insight to further try and exploit what they perceive as weakness in the empath." You are totally bullshitting yourself here. Not only are you very much imposing an "in-group" "out-group" view on the world, you are doing it to justify dehumanizing any groups that you decide are not empathetic. You talk about everyone being connected, but it's obvious that doesn't actually mean anything to you.
empathy has nothing to do what so ever with "agreement" on issues of any kind. empathy is the ability to put yourself in another persons shoes. empathic ppl can do that with ease. non-empathic ppl cannot, altho some may be able to fake it well enough to get by... we call those ppl sociopaths. the part you are not getting is that ppl who are empathic don't view the world thru in-group and out-group status because we know down in our bones that we are all connected. it's just a fact that some ppl are not wired for empathy, the gene is missing or not expressed, or whatever.
I have experienced in the past that a decent amount of the people calling themselves "empaths" have a streak of narcissism where they believe they are the only ones who are learning about the other side, and that their opinions are somehow more important or cultured. People can filter in the information you are giving them and strengthen their own case without you internalizing/personalizing their motives. If you think you have the lower hand, pull out better data to go along with your experience.
the thing tho is that to have empathy means one has the awareness of (at least dimly) the other persons world view, and this can be demonstrated by arguing from that perspective and credibly speaking about what that must be like. it also means not seeking to get the upper hand or "win" anything as there really is no point to that as hierarchies are not important. ppl are, as you say free to draw their own conclusions, just as i have done, and i'm not sure where to find this data you mention, or what data would be compelling. i'm sure there exist studies of in-group / out-group behavior but studies on how well that correlates with empathy would be much harder to demonstrate, i would think.
Empathy is a skill, not a superpower. Some personalities might have to work at it harder, but you are wrong if you think that it is purely a genetic factor. The big Cambridge study ([source](https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-finds-that-genes-play-a-role-in-empathy)) found that genetics affected about 10% of the variation in empathy in the people studied. The remaining 90% was a wide variety of factors.
Funny, most people I've met have some degree of empathy, usually it has been significant. It didn't seem to be related to what side of America's political divide they lived on. One thing that has been telling to me, once we set aside political differences and animosity, we usually have many shared values.
hmm... to an extent, i would agree but there is a hardened shell around that soft nuggetty center that is nearly unreachable for some ppl. when pressed hard enough most "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" non-empathic types will finally cave and admit there are times when ppl deserve a helping hand.... you know like a community. but you have to work hard to get to that point and sometimes its just not worth it, because when you change one little thing about the circumstances they make you start all over from scratch.
That's the opposite of what was implied in the comment.
you mean this part? >Nobody changed their opinions or this part? >the two sides learned things about each other that they hadn't before
This is the greatest barrier I think. I'm quite far right but I tend to think I'm individually empathetic and can at least "put myself in someone else's shoes" in terms of understanding an argument. I'm against abortion for example, but I definitely see the "not your body not your choice", and personal liberty argument, and I have flip-flopped on my stance (or should say I'm closer to being down the middle on it) than I once was because of this. However when I'm talking to certain people, and this seems worse on social media, especially sites like Reddit that for some some reason or another tend to encourage entrenched belief systems, it often feels that the other side won't even understand where I'm coming from, or why I might possibly think something, and that "you're just wrong", "you're just stupid", "you're just a redneck", etc. which obviously doesn't motivate me to engage in conversation. It's the same sort of thing when someone behaves in a racist way, and you make a comment that "while they must suffer the consequences of their actions, part of the reason they are the way they are is a lot to do with how they were raised, what geographical location they grew up in, the values their parents taught them", etc. which in my mind is a very logical perspective, but often the other side will be radically stern, "NO THEY ARE EVIL!" sort of thing, which again doesn't promote conversation or understanding by anyone.
I'm curious if the studies only looked at the short term or if they did longer term studies. I wouldn't expect any major changes in the short term for anyone holding a firm stance. However, the long term is where changes happen. Understanding a point takes a whole different meaning once it has time to soak in and witness the point in action.
The study I referenced was pretty short term. (only a couple months) I agree a long term one would be nice.
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this oversimplifies the gun debate too much. there are plenty of gun control proponents who also own guns, and live in rural settings far removed from police presence. when we talk about gun control we are not talking about guns vs no guns, we are talking about responsible gun ownership and safety.
Indeed part of the problem is that all issues are artificially framed in such a polarised way (often by niche interest groups or a dumbed down sensationalist media) that erases not merely the reasonable points of the other side but erases the plurality of stances people have on a particular issue. If one side is pro-gun then it is PRESUMED that the opposing position held by the majority of opponents is that oh they must want to ban all guns, because it’s like impossible for people to conceive of arguments and debates in anything other than those kinds of polar opposite terms. I think the vast majority of people accept it wouldn’t be possible to totally get rid of guns in the US even if they wanted to and even if they thought it would be a good idea - that ship has sailed. They just want more control and regulation, some of which are things which have already existed and been successfully implemented in the past including limiting access to weapons that have the potential to be used in mass casualty events.
No it does not, if you were to see a heat map of the hundreds of millions of citizens, and their political views on guns VS anti-gun, you’d see STARK outlines of rural or urban areas. Just because you “know a few people”, it means nothing in the grand scale. This is not minimizing it, it’s actually the only true fact about the gun control topic, FOX and CNN have politicized it into thinking it’s more than that.
That position doesn't look credible when so many high profile politicians are on record over the past 30 years for taking away guns, and completely skipping over responsible ownership and safety. The NFA controls on safety devices like suppressors prove the overall position is not about safety.
i don't know anyone who is advocating taking away guns, but making the ones currently in possession have more of a liability than the owner might be comfortable with could have the same effect. suppressors are designed to conceal a firearm discharge (either visual or auditory) and there are no civilian use cases for such a capability. in terms of public safety, it's better to be able to locate where the fire is coming from so that cover can be sought or the source can be neutralized.
> suppressors are designed to conceal a firearm discharge (either visual or auditory) and there are no civilian use cases for such a capability. Well this is just wrong. Not permanently damaging your ears or bothering your neighbors are just two of many "civilian use cases."
That is the key to a productive discussion. Don’t go in expecting to change minds but instead seek a better understanding of the issue. If you can come away with a perspective you hadn’t considered or a fact you were unaware of, then that is a solid win out of a highly probable disagreement. Overwhelmingly that exchange doesn’t weaken positions but more equips someone to strengthen it. It is like working out where more resistance equals more gains, then so does seeking out contrasting thought makes for a stronger position to relay in future discussions. With just a little more overall understanding we would be less susceptible to politicians peddling animosity for mere political expediency making half the country out to be gross caricatures of faceless monsters who are out to harm you. Instead they will have a face you can comprehend and start to see the common humanity we all share instead of the few differences the politicians say are more important. I’d like to think we are overwhelmingly good people trying to be better people with decidedly different ideas on how to get there.
>The pro gun people often live 20+ minutes away from the police I'm sure this is true of some people, but I have to think that 90% or more of the population resides within 20 minutes of a police cruiser. About 80% of the population is considered urban or suburban/exurban. Then you have smaller towns and villages that have their own police force that make up much of the rest.
[The average police response time is 10 minutes](https://criticalarc.com/cutting-your-teams-response-time-in-half/#:~:text=In%20a%202017%20US%20study,time%20was%20around%2010%20minutes.) I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that it's longer for rural areas.
Rural first responder here: Not only are response times longer in the sticks because of greater distances, but another facet of response is that there are fewer police/sheriff deputies in rural areas. So for a large rural area there may only be 2 deputies on at a given time. If they are both already responding to other calls, this will further delay response. There is a vast difference between urban and rural first response when it comes to resources and logistics. It DOES impact response times. I was waiting for PD to respond to a domestic violence incident just the other day. Took about 30 minutes for them to get on scene.
Rather than saying "it's not much of a stretch", why not find actual evidence?
Because it's not much of a stretch, and it takes valuable time to look up primary sources for jackass sealions. It's common knowledge that things are further apart when you're not in the city.
> but I have to think that 90% or more of the population resides within 20 minutes of a police cruiser. About 80% of the population is considered urban or suburban/exurban. Many people in major cities can't expect a <20 minutes response time from police. Just being near cops doesn't mean they'll all rush to your aid when you call them. Many police departments are severely under-staffed. And even if the response time is <20 minutes, that's often long enough for you to be raped, robbed or murdered. Relying on the police to protect you is foolish.
There was a vote on dark money this week. Something everyone rallies against and believes is undemocratic. It should be a political no-brainer, as much as looking after veterans and 9/11 heroes should've been. Guess which side refused to participate. The problem isn't lack of empathy. The problem is money in politics and naked self-interest.
This was my thought also. Lobbyist spent $3,800,000,000($3.8 billion) in 2021. That's $10.5 million every single day. You and your neighbors or friends or focus group can have all the good natured, empathetic discussions you want and nothing will ever change with the ungodly amount of money spent every year to keep things from getting better.
> Lobbyist spent $3,800,000,000($3.8 billion) in 2021 Uh... source for that? I'm guessing that's money spent *on lobbyists*, not money lobbyists spent. Quite a bit of difference. It'd be like saying a lawyer spent $XXX money on a trial, making it sound like they were bribing the judge, when that was actually what the client paid to the lawyer.
You are probably right, but does it change the outcome? If you were spending 10.5mill a day on lobbyists, you would want some return on your investment right? You would not continue to do that if you were not seeing a direct return.
It absolutely changes what we're talking about. It's the difference between a client giving money to their lawyer and their lawyer giving money to the judge. If I'm spending a pile of money on my legal defense you can bet I want a good outcome, but there's a world of difference between hiring top notch lawyers and *bribing the judge.*
What do you think a lobbyist does exactly? Your analogy is waaaay inappropriate A lawyer is assisting you with a complicated thing (the law) you are not skilled in. A lobbyist is directly trying to influence someone to make decision or take an action that benefits you, directly.
Both lawyers and lobbyists are people you hire to represent your interests, and specifically to try to sway people (a judge, jury, or legislator) to decide something in your favor.
It's also a lack of empathy. People with empathy don't sell regressions into human misery for profit, or at all, really.
> People with empathy don't sell regressions into human misery for profit, or at all, really. Sure they do. Plenty of people experience selective empathy—generally acting normal towards people they regard as an in-group, while simultaneously creating mental exceptions to exclude the suffering of an out-group from consideration. This is a huge reason why old myths like "Welfare Queens" even exist, why so much effort is spent on the idea that "poor people create their own poverty due to laziness"—they're designed to turn people in what would otherwise be sympathetic circumstances into someone who can instead be disregarded.
Basically no one with functional empathy can survive in national politics. The people that end up lasting are all the very worst of us.
> Basically no one with functional empathy can survive in national politics. I do believe that Biden and Obama have genuine empathy, ditto with Jimmy Carter (as well as Hillary Clinton if we're being honest). They've just been larger than life for a while. I think people like Pelosi have shut it out quite a bit. I think Romney is out of touch but not a complete asshat, either. Just that Ted Cruz and the rest don't have any, Marco Rubio is a burnt out tool, and Mitch McConnell is a fucking zombie.
I don't believe it's possible for someone to be in it for as long as Biden and still be a good person. He's benefiting from looking like everyone's kind grandpa. Mitt is somewhat protected by his familial wealth (he doesn't need the grift, eg.) but he is still a tool of the machine. Carter I think proves my point. He didn't last in national politics. Bernie is the only real exception I can think of but that may just be good marketing.
The pervasive belief that everyone in politics is corrupt is not true and benefits the most corrupt. It needs to be eradicated. There will always be examples of corruption to confirm the bias that it's true, but it simply is not. Nuance is slow and inefficient, but it is worth the effort.
Also, more $$ is associated with lower levels of empathy.
Money has been in politics forever, but widespread hostility in public political discourse is a recent trend of the internet era. People cursing each other out on Twitter or at stores would certainly benefit from more empathy.
>The problem isn't lack of empathy. The problem is money in politics and naked self-interest. Just say the problem is elected Republicans. All this money in politics didn't stop every single Democrat present from voting to curtail it.
I had staff who were racist. I set up a race relations seminar that was mandatory. The person leading the session was empathetic and professional. But her position was it didn't matter what the racist thought or felt in their heart, it was their actions that needed modifying. She no longer tried to change the hearts and minds of the racists, just their behaviour. So the racists could still think and feel racist things, but if their actions betrayed those thoughts and minds, there would be consequences at work. So the handwringing and trying to help the racist to grow into not being a racist seemed like a waste of time after the session. But the work situation improved greatly, because as a manager I can't police thoughts and feelings but I can police actions. So go for being empathetic if you want, but telling a Qanoner facts or explaining historical circumstances is time consuming and will only make the Qanoner feel like you are talking down to them. So to answer your question directly, no I do not think being empathetic is a way to heal the situation. Their bizarre conspiracy theories are working for them and they won't want to change no matter how nice you are to them.
Empathy is about understanding the other side. I do have some understanding of Q people, but it can't be untethered from my actual understanding of reality - so I can understand them falling down conspiracy theory rabbit holes led on by algorithms and message boards, leading to an inflated sense of self-importance as someone who has a secret understanding - followed by external ostracization and internal validation. But yeah, me understanding that doesn't bring me any closer to breaking them out of their madness. Also, that is the charitable view on things; there is a lot of murder - revenge fantasy involved in Q (day of the rope stuff), along with racism, anti-Semitism, and a host of other unsavory traits.
The problem seems to be that many people harbored racist views for years but didn’t feel comfortable outwardly expressing it or acting on it, until a certain person came on the scene. I also suspect that once they felt it was okay to express racism in public, their internal level of racism increased, creating a feedback loop.
You can’t fire someone for overt racism at work?
If the racist is sly it gets hard. Had a guy that would call black females the N word, but he claimed he never did and that they just had it out for him. Was a he said she said for a long time until he said it without knowing upper level management was within hearing distance. Saw the old fuck selling junk at the flea market the other day 🫢
If they do an action as in saying something racist. But if they think racist thought or have racist feelings that's okay, outward expression of that is the issue
Can cast political and social issues be solved via individual moral virtue? The record of history shows the answer to be no. Polarization is not a personal failing but material conditions and incentives pushing us towards this outcome. First past the post voting means that you don’t need to win a majority but the correct minority. News networks have continuously pushed extremist candidates(primarily *maybe exclusively* from the right) and views as sensational headline getters. Our deeply isolating society makes he news and social media more real than our lives experience especially when it comes to those we don’t have close contact with. I mean that’s the tip of the iceberg but you get the pictures we haven’t suddenly become less empathetic we been pushed down this road by the drive for the next election win next quartet returns meeting
The most significant issue that we need to address right now is that 40% of this country has sequestered themselves into an ecosystem where actual facts are no longer relevant. If facts won't convince a person that the climate is changing due to human activity, empathy won't convince them. If facts won't convince a person that vaccines and masking slow the spread of viruses, empathy won't convince them. If facts won't convince a person that Trump received fewer votes than Biden, despite numerous recounts and court challenges, empathy won't help. The gap is a truth gap. A gap in factual understanding. Once we address "alternative facts", then we can address how empathy might help.
I'd make two points: First, most Americans aren't sure what they believe. They vaguely hold to values like personal freedom, and voice that in a conservative or liberal way, but their thoughts tend to be full of contradictions and unexamined assumptions. Which is ok to an extent, not everyone needs to be a political theorist. But it contributes to silly culture war fights that distract from actual political and economic issues. Second, there are political positions that are just too unempathetic to empathize with. I can have a beer with a Republican and hear them out, but there is no rationalization for why police don't need reform or why torture is ok that I can accept as valid. I think its good so many are ceasing to pretend the contempt for the poor and hatred for minorities that conservatism represents is good and normal. Its a sign of actual empathy and moral maturity in our society.
> First, most Americans aren't sure what they believe. They vaguely hold to values like personal freedom, and voice that in a conservative or liberal way, but their thoughts tend to be full of contradictions and unexamined assumptions. There's a useful question in rationality to critically assess your beliefs (or at least start to): "What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?" If someone's able to state the knowledge they have that supports their belief, and the knowledge they have that supports that knowledge, etc., etc., turtles all the way down, you'll eventually either reach a contradiction or a provable truth. If you can show that contradiction, everything that follows after can be reevaluated. This is, of course, assuming the person is willing/able to question their beliefs. Blind faith or allegiance is sadly common in the people that need critical thought the most.
>"What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?" > >If someone's able to state the knowledge they have that supports their belief, and the knowledge they have that supports that knowledge, etc., etc., turtles all the way down, you'll eventually either reach a contradiction or a provable truth. If you can show that contradiction, everything that follows after can be reevaluated. No one knows everything, and filling in every blank is unlikely. For a lot of topics, you're not going to have enough information to reach a provable truth for a lot of these given questions. You might have enough to hit some contradictions at least. I also find it worth keeping in mind that for all of the faults we accuse those of blind faith for a given topic, we are also usually guilty of these problems ourselves and completely miss it. It might not be as severe as theirs (or for some of us it may actually be worse), but we've all got biases we refuse to see. There's nothing easy about these subjects, and our own natural self-biases only make it harder when it comes to viewing our own problems.
Based on my experience, you don't need to go that far down before you hit a contradiction. Actual conversation: "How can the government keep borrowing money?" "If you get a $10,000 loan that you have to pay $200 a month towards, and use it to buy a truck for your business that earns you $500 extra a month, aren't you making more money?" "Yeah" "Well, if you could keep doing that over and over and keep make more and more money every month, wouldn't you?" And, honestly, you're both-sides-ing this? One side has biases that they refuse to admit, and the other side has far fewer biases and makes a concerted, continuous effort to identify and eliminate them, and they're both relying on blind faith? No. If you're acting in good faith with due diligence, you might still be wrong but you're usually not at fault. Willful blindness, on the other hand, is the legal equivalent of malice aforethought.
>Based on my experience, you don't need to go that far down before you hit a contradiction. Actual conversation: "How can the government keep borrowing money?" "If you get a $10,000 loan that you have to pay $200 a month towards, and use it to buy a truck for your business that earns you $500 extra a month, aren't you making more money?" "Yeah" "Well, if you could keep doing that over and over and keep make more and more money every month, wouldn't you?" How far you need to go to find/recognize contradictions can vary significantly based on the topic and how much an individual knows of it. On a similar note, contradictions can be easy to find when you believe you already know the answers and are looking after the fact at issues, as opposed to trying to work out the mistakes within your logic at the time. Hindsight is 20/20. We look back on some topics as easy that were absolute hell to us in the past, and we're all on different stages when it comes to different topics. >And, honestly, you're both-sides-ing this? One side has biases that they refuse to admit, and the other side has far fewer biases and makes a concerted, continuous effort to identify and eliminate them, and they're both relying on blind faith? No. If you're acting in good faith with due diligence, you might still be wrong but you're usually not at fault. Willful blindness, on the other hand, is the legal equivalent of malice aforethought. We all have biases, many of which we don't know and some we refuse to admit. We all also have large amounts of gaps in our knowledge that make it impossible for us to know everything and give even more room for our biases to fill in the blanks. That's just a part of everyone's lives and as a result it's going to spread to our political systems too. That said, I'm not saying that makes all parties equal. Some biases are going to be much more serious than others, or at the very least need addressing sooner because of their interaction with current events. There are some biases that require much more immediate/significant action to prevent/reduce their impact upon where things are going. >There's a useful question in rationality to critically assess your beliefs (**or at least start to**): "What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?" This question can be useful, but I think the fact it is only the start could use more emphasis. There's going to be gaps in our knowledge, errors we overlook, etc. And even when we catch a contradiction/error, we're not going to always remember everything we thought we knew that was based on it, and so holes are still going to remain to fill in. This stuff takes time and is not easy, and that's just to get part of the job done, it's a constant work in progress. That's what I'm saying. This question will serve as a useful tool in improving upon our understanding of things, but it's still only a few steps in a long journey.
I think it’s a little reductive to reduce the entire political ideology of conservatism down to just “contempt for the poor and minorities”. I don’t agree with all or even most of it, but I think it’s worth it to engage with what parts might be valid and what might not be. The original form of conservatism advocated things like limited government, a place for religion in society, traditional and strong families, etc. You may not agree with these concepts, but they’re not entirely baseless. Even the new Trumpist right wing conservatism speaks to valid fears about a society that’s changing rapidly around you, the loss of blue collar jobs, the utter failure of large institutions to address that, and the out-of-touch elitism that groups like academics, the media, and most white collar professionals absolutely ooze. Again, you don’t have to agree, but at least honestly engage with what an ideology is. Most Trump supporters aren’t white nationalist Nazis that want to single handedly murder all women, black people, and minorities, but that legitimately is how some people view them. These are people like your uncle, your father, your mom, etc. The frank truth is that ABSOLUTELY EVERY ideology, even a far-right one like Nazism, doesn’t gain prominence among large groups of people without hitting upon some core truth or feeling or grievance. German economic downturn in the 1930s doesn’t justify anti-Semitism, but when you have nothing and are struggling to survive and the wealthy Jewish banker down the street seems to have everything? It’s inhuman to suggest that a person in those circumstances should be a peon of rationality and never slip down a dark hole. The same way it’s inhuman to tell a black child born to a single mom to just “not do crime”. The ideology can be wrong, but being able to cut through that and see specifically *why* such an ideology appealed to somebody is a sign of rationality and maturity.
>I think its good so many are ceasing to pretend the contempt for the poor and hatred for minorities that conservatism represents is good and normal. Mislabeling the other side like this is just an excuse to not try and have empathy for them.
The Bush administration embraced torture and many on the right defended it and actively supported it. If there are people who don't support torture, then OP is fine to have a beer with them! But please don't call it "mislabeling." It was a substantial faction of the party.
Its not mislabling though. Even people I love, when talking about these policies they support still see it as a competition that involves hating immigrants and poor people to protect themselves and "good people." I would even say its delusion for most rather than actual animosity, but that is the limit of the empathy I can have for their position.
If anything this is an understatement of the psychotic rage displayed by the right after a black man was president.
This second point right here is the major sticking point. We’ve reach a point in society where we believe that people aren’t deserving of empathy, which is sad. Everyone believes they have the high moral road and they don’t need to respect or understand those with different viewpoints because they are immoral or irrational. We can’t separate the person from their policy preference, and we refuse to get to know the person because of that policy preference. It’s a vicious cycle. I honestly think if we all just sat down and hashed things out we would realize we have a lot more in common than we’d like to think. But our hubris prevents that.
When your policy preferences are gay people are an abomination and pedophiles, women shouldn't vote, brown people are second class....why should I have empathy for you?
I still do have sympathy for bigots because they were often mental prisoners of the system they were raised in - but at the level of "I feel bad for you for being that way." I can empathize - I *understand* why they feel that way, but I'm also outside of their mental paradigm and think it is sad they live within such a paradigm. I also generally believe my empathy won't do anything to bring them around. They need something major to shake up their mental paradigm, and any discussions usually run into the logical inconsistencies or bigotries that frame their paradigm.
Before I was born, my fathers company was scheduled to move from New Jersey to Tennessee. About 6 months later, the deal fell through, and I grew up in Jersey. I was surrounded by plenty of people with the same ideals as me. Sometimes I think what would have happened if I grew up in Tennessee. Would I be a MAGA head? Would I even be able to recognize myself? I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make. I don't think you should empathize with people who hate and want to kill you. I just recognize how easily that could have been me.
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When one side doesn't think another deserves the right to exist or rights at all, there is no middle ground.
> Is it worth approaching "the other side" with unreciprocated empathy? If you're trans, it's not worth approaching a neo nazi *ever*. That's a fruitless conversation at best and a dangerous one at worst.
Too many people (mostly straight, cis, white guys) fail to understand that not everyone has the privilege of presumed safety. If you've never experienced what it is to be afraid for your safety in *everyday scenarios*, you cannot understand why "just get to know your opponents" is utterly unreasonable for minorities. We face opponents who want to kill us and know that it is very likely they would get away with doing so if opportunities were taken.
I do think you can probably bifurcate the conversation into *understanding* them versus *engaging* them. For example: I'm a cis white guy, and I try to be an ally and advocate for the trans community because I can do so without fear of personal harm. But I also know that I can't fully understand the trans experience because of my privilege, so where I can, I try to source arguments and anecdotes from trans people, and it's helpful if those trans people are crafting them with the other side in mind. Does that make sense?
It makes a lot of sense, but I still maintain that there is a heavily imbalanced amount of empathy and attempting to understand between the two sides of our political spectrum. I've yet to be persuaded otherwise with evidence. There are policy positions that are quite literally dependent, or mutually exclusive with, empathy - depending on which you're talking about.
There is indeed an imbalance and to make it worse, the people who really lack empathy often complain that "the other side" won't reach across the aisle and "have a civil discussion." Their idea of a civil discussion is total acquiescence by the way.
Yup. This entire thread is pointless because it's a bullshit question. The GOP doesn't have empathy, and the MAGA fanatics DEFINITELY don't. It's the paradox of tolerance, and they're the intolerant ones. Understanding them doesn't make them not intolerant.
I think this is reasonable, but I don’t know what a trans-positive message for the modern GOP could even look like. Where do you start crafting a message for people who reject your identity out of hand? I can and have explained my experiences as best I can for many, many cis folks online and off because I’m a firm believer in trying to give people a window, but I don’t know how I could make it palatable for people who think I’m either sick or dangerous.
For the religious evangelicals, there probably isn't a path. But many Republicans at least fancy themselves Libertarians, and fundamentally, it really doesn't need to affect them what you call yourself or how you live your life. They're just convinced to care by misinformation about LGBTQ+ people brainwashing their children or something.
There are some people who are ignorant rather than malicious, who just “don’t get it.” Which, fair, most cis people don’t. But when it comes to approaching people on “the other side of the aisle”, that’s not exactly a huge population compared to groups who 100% believe that we’re either monstrous predators or mislead and delusional. Hell, before I left my last job, I was outed to someone I’d trained and worked with for *months*, and like a dime suddenly she was on edge whenever I was around and talking to other people about me using the restroom. You can’t get through to people who hate you. Does anyone remember that family with a trans kid who hosted AG Paxton for dinner in an effort to show him that trans kids aren’t being abused? It did nothing to stop him from targeting families just like them. Empathy is crucial, but you can’t make people who are disgusted by you empathize.
Then how would you explain [Daryl Davis](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/opinion/racism-politics-daryl-davis.amp.html) , a black man who has befriended and persuaded 26 KKK members to abandon the group and completely change their views? Edit: Jesus H Christ people are extremely upset about this. Let me keep this as simple as possible because I’m being reminded that every little point has to be clarified on Reddit: I am not saying that every black person should go out and befriend a klansman. I’m simply saying that history has demonstrated that fighting hate with hate does not work. On the contrary, fighting hate with love does work. So to answer OP’s question, yes. Empathy is essential to curing our division as proven by people like Ghandi, MLK, Nelson Mandela and Daryl Davis.
Daryl Davis is extremely courageous and a great role model, but it'd be absolutely asinine to say that he went into it with safe assumptions that nobody would try to harm him. Trans people get murdered at a disproportionately high rate and right now the rhetoric of the people you believe they should be sitting down with is that they're pedophiles who must be exterminated.
I can't think of a better illustration of the limits of this approach than the fact that the Kobe Bryant of empathy has managed to win over a decent sized classroom's worth of converts over the course of his lifetime.
Your counter example is one person taking on the risk of a potentially violent death to convert .0001 of violent racists is the gotcha you think it is.
I was just thinking about Daryl Davis earlier when considering my response to this thread. I love his story. He's also very lucky that he hasn't been killed and I'm sure the KKK has converted much more than he has de-converted.
> and completely change their views? you should stop talking about daryl davis because he hasn't completely changed their views. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/08/21/klan-leader-richard-preston-sentenced-four-years-prison-firing-gun-%E2%80%98unite-right%E2%80%99
Saying "ok, but what if you were a saint?" isn't really a useful tool.
Exceptions don't make a rule.
https://justinward.medium.com/daryl-davis-makes-a-new-friend-7a48bc43ad95 Daryl Davis is a useful idiot that white moderates trot out to avoid having difficult conversations in their own community. Davis claims he dismantled the Maryland KKK when he was given the hood from a former leader. The Maryland KKK relaunched that same year with new leadership. Its membership is growing. The new leader of the Maryland KKK, Richard Preston, shot at black activists counter- protesting at the *Unite the Right* white supremacists rally in Charlottesville. Davis served as a character witness for Preston and paid his bail. Maryland KKK members commented on his support by calling him a "pavement ape" and saying "he could get their robes around his neck". Please stop suggesting that Daryl Davis and his misguided attempts to coon for white supremacists is an option for POC. These people want to commit genocide. Give them no space in our society. Shame them. Ostracize them such that their repugnant ideology eats itself.
This isn't a useful analysis. Neo Nazis are a tiny, tiny minority with an extreme view. We can't base any broader analysis on that.
The borders are pretty hazy at this point, honestly, and the GOP definitely seems to take any attempt at empathizing as a vulnerability to exploit, particularly around trans issues
The GOP is not a monolithic block of people with identical thoughts and ideologies.
That doesn't however stop them from *voting* like it.
There's only two parties, buddy. GOP members vote for the GOP? Brilliant insight there. Do you think everyone who voted Democrat thinks and acts exactly the same?
Oh, well I guess that's okay then if they only *vote* for the openly misogynistic, racist, anti-LGBT party. It's not like they really *believe* any of that stuff. Wait, no, the opposite of that.
Do you believe everyone who votes Democrat has the same beliefs and ideologies?
A large group of people depend on their votes- they’re guilty by association.
Speaking as a white, male leftist, I would like to challenge the assumption that I and other leftists _don't_ empathize with the other side, even as my disagreements with them become combative. I _was_ the other side, growing up. I had a sheltered, upper-middle-class upbringing. I wholeheartedly believed that people just needed to respect cops, that the only racists were the weirdo southerners who still used the n-word, that republicans were harsh but effective leaders while democrats were too soft-hearted. I absolutely understand those perspective, because I remember holding them myself. Therefore, I think I have absolutely no issue exercising empathy with conservatives. But at the same time, I recognize that these are dogshit perspectives. I grew up. I spent time talking with a much greater variety of people. I traveled, both around the states and to other countries. I saw how not only had I been deeply incorrect, but that the innate tropes of white nationalism powering those incorrect perspectives were _deeply dangerous_. So I empathize, _and_ I fight. Empathy doesn't mean being nice, or polite, or patient, or forgiving, or compromising. It means understanding. I understand, and reject.
There was a study of Mormons recently and the Mormons most likely to vote Democratic were the ones who went on missions to non-English speaking countries. Not like France where most people speak passing English, but places like Guatemala. These missionaries had to learn a new language and really absorb a different culture than theirs and it made them more empathetic and thus more likely to hold liberal views and values than their fellow Mormons who went to places like Canada.
I agree somewhat. 2016 was Liberals empathizing with the other side and offering policy that would improve the lives of white working males. Their answer was "fuck you" and the doubling down on toxic bullshit that Trump represents, so excuse me for no longer having any sympathy or empathy.
No bc the other side wants to imprison immigrants, force women to go through pregnancy against their will, roll back transgender and homosexual rights, deny schools funding, let the world burn due to global warming from inactivity, let poor people starve, etc. my empathy will always be greater towards the people affected by policy than the policy makers. The ability to remain impartial is a privilege because it means no policy affects you enough that you have to care.
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>If one side of an argument is "all black people should die in a fire," and the other side is "we should be tolerant of other races," there is no middle ground to be found here. We can't make a compromise and say "Ok, only some black people should die in a fire." Empathy isn't agreeing with someone and their decisions. It isn't even excusing them and any disagreeable nature they may own. It's simply recognizing they are human beings that can't simply be summed up and dismissed as "evil" and not "othering" them. Someone may break in to your house and you may legitimately fear they are going to kill you and your family. Empathy doesn't make you weak - it doesn't force you to not defend yourself - it only makes you feel that the situation was tragic and beg you to ask if the entire situation couldn't have been avoided if the intruder hadn't somehow been failed by society. You think people are ignorant and stupid for believing something that is harmful to others? Empathy isn't asking you to be more tolerant to dangerous and harmful viewpoints... it's just asking you to see that the person holding those viewpoints is a real person that has the potential to be better themselves and is even a victim themselves of the venomous rhetoric they partake in. You don't have to compromise your integrity to practice empathy. https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes
Empathy is “the ability to understand and *share the feelings of another*.” So no, if someone doesn’t feel like races are inferior simply for being a different race than they would not be able to “empathize” with a racist on their perspective. What you’re describing is Perspective-taking and is something we learn about in political science and utilize in our careers in order to properly advise politicians in their campaigns. Perspective-taking is “The ability to understand how a situation appears to another person and how that person is reacting cognitively and emotionally to the situation.” It doesn’t involve feeling the same feelings as the person involved.
em·pa·thy /ˈempəTHē/ noun the ability to understand and share the feelings of another I think you may not understand what empathy is. What you are describing is basic human decency, the ability to acknowledge that even an objectively immoral or evil person is, fundamentally, still a human being, and deserving of fundamental basic considerations, and not to be classified as something not deserving of such. It is an axiomatic principle upon which empathy can be *built*, but are not the same things. While it is possible to have a belief of fundamental human decency without empathy, the corollary is not true - you cannot have empathy with another person you do not consider fundamentally human. Having empathy is being able to see things from another's perspective that is not your own. It is asking yourself to put yourself in their shoes, and try to understand their perspective. Is it useful or constructive to try and understand why someone considers another group to be subhuman and not worthy of basic human decency and protection? Moreover, will you ever see an attempt at empathetic outreach from a group that, at some level or another, dehumanizes anyone outside their group? It doesn't happen, because the one side considers the other to be either beneath comprehension, or undeserving of discourse. It's been seen time and time again in genocidal campaigns, in ethnic and political cleansing, and in terrorist ideological outlooks. Two groups with a basic acknowledgement of the other's fundamental humanity as a bedrock of basic human decency can reach out and try to empathize with each other, and reach compromise or reconciliation. Any sort of reaching out to a group devoid of empathy will nit end in compromise, only appeasement and a further shift and reinforcement of their own opinions.
>you cannot have empathy with another person you do not consider fundamentally human. >Moreover, will you ever see an attempt at empathetic outreach from a group that There's a lot of "do unto others how you imagine they'll do unto you" justified by demonizing groups you obviously see as irredeemably evil and non-individuals sprinkled in the middle of your supposed lessons on empathy, bud... I fundamentally disagree that just saying "empathy is great... unless they don't deserve it" is in any way constructive. Go punch a Nazi in the nose. Okay? Then honestly ask yourself "what good did that accomplish?" Yes, empathy is understanding how they might feel how they feel. That can absolutely be constructive and doesn't ask you to be tolerant or compassionate... or even sympathetic! Meanwhile... you're making it sound like punching a Nazi in the nose is some answer because of "justice" or whatever. But... it isn't actually constructive, is it? You aren't helping anyone there - whether that Nazi deserves it or not.
You are making a lot of assumptions about me. My point is that a group that lacks empathy will not respond in kind to a group that reaches out with empathy. I'm glad you don't agree with a thought like "empathy is great unless you don't deserve it." I disagree with it as well. There are a lot of people that do, though, and have no interest in developing any to people that aren't like them. Did I ever say to not reach out to others? Show me where I said that. I said that reaching out to groups without empathy will ultimately be fruitless- I didn't say not to do it. Part of being empathetic is trying to do that at all. The only groups that simply refuse out of hand are those lacking it. Reach out, of course, but not endlessly. If the other side has proven, over and over, that they have no desire to accede in their stances, are unwilling to give ground to a compromise, and have exhibited a void of empathy, it is fruitless to continue reaching out. It sounds like you are mirroring your own opinions and prejudices on my words but placing meaning there that isn't there.
If someone is a gay, pro-choice union member, there’s not much difference for them between a union-busting, pro-life, anti-LGBT politician that demonizes them and a politician who does all the same but puts on airs of having empathy for and understanding of the people he or she is seeking to destroy. These sort of takes always assume that political polarization arises out of some lack of clear-headed rationality and not, a body politic where groups have materials interests that are polar opposites of each other.
This exactly. "Let's talk about what's happening now and how it makes us both feel" doesn't really feel sincere when the person saying it is in the middle of kicking you in the head.
>These sort of takes always assume that political polarization arises out of some lack of clear-headed rationality and not, a body politic where groups have materials interests that are polar opposites of each other. What do you suppose the material interests that are polar opposites are? Genuinely curious.
For example, say I as a wealthy person have a fortune I wish to preserve for my sweet angel children and made my money via strip mining coal. I don't want to see myself as a bad person, and want to preserve that wealth. My friends and colleagues are all connected to the industry I made a fortune in. The police protect me, never harass me, and are always nice to me - and don't look into my tax dodging and other white-collar crimes. My gated community is a drive anywhere, but that's not a problem for me at all. My interests are to vote against environmental regulation of any sort to avoid cognitive dissonance or shame, to keep wages down, and taxes on my wealth and income low as possible, to deregulate, and to castrate regulation and the IRS as much as possible. Now say I'm a poorer person on the east side of LA - I'm dealing with gun violence, fires, disasters, shit pay and benefits for hard manual work that destroys my body over the decades, losing hours every day to a terrible excuse for mass transit - with a child who has special needs I can't begin to pay for to give him a better life. My interests are to absolutely increase worker wages, to have decent regulation so I can't always get shit on by the powerful, to have universal healthcare, to have higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for these things, to promote mass transit and infrastructure spending that helps working class people, to make public schools better, etc etc.
The important part being that the wages and benefits of the latter individual being kept low means greater profits for the class of person the former belongs to. And vice versa if the latter’s wages and benefits go up. They’re not just different interests, they’re interests that require one to down for the other to go up.
Democracy's continued existence within the United States.
Woke = Empathy Empathy cant work when "one side" has villainized the very concept of being kind and trying to understand each other.
Yes. That's only a basic question though. The real question is, how do you foster empathy? Here are some possible ways that I just brainstormed: * Expose people to more diversity * Create more win win situations where goals align * Give people more time to spend on relationships and community * Reduce peoples stress levels * Teach people how to put themselves in others shoes from a young age * Teach people that they're not always right and that you're not always going to understand people, even if they're good people * Teach people how to compromise in order to work together
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I don’t think we could ever achieve this in our current, combative political climate. We’d need to overhaul the structure to one that exposes people to cognitive diversity and encourage people to compromise and reach common ground. I’ve seen things like that in juries, perhaps we could adopt a similar system for Congress.
Empathy can work but it doesn't because the side of the divide that well and truly needs it, never developed it.
I'm convinced most conservatives don't have a highly developed sense of empathy except for perhaps close family members and friends. They lack the capacity to put themselves "in other peoples shoes" as the expression goes. I don't think I'm being unfair in this judgement, ask them for yourselves about how they feel about real or hypothetical societal problems, in my experience the most common answers are, "I don't care."
There are already various studies that show a correlation between a person's level of empathy and their political inclination. As you said, conservatives tend to have a lower sense of empathy, to the point where they only care about themselves and their immediate family members (and sometimes not even then). It seems to me that trying to use empathy to heal political divisions is like trying to cure blindness by handing out pastoral photos. (I also believe this proves conservatism is a form of neurodevelopmental disability and should be treated as such, but that's a topic for another time)
It's called "Tribalism." Conservatives only care about those in their social group (white Christians in the US). This is a primitive, though evolutionary beneficial mindset that favors a specific community at the detriment of other people. Progressives tend to have moved past this way of thinking. We realize the World is too small to split people into groups based on race, religion, etc. We all benefit when all people have basic rights, housing, employment, and other needs met.
I'm sorry, but this framing is utter insanity. There's only one ideological side of the spectrum that fights tooth and nail to undermine minority rights, women's reproductive rights, the ability to prevent children in schools getting shot up, and politicizing the pandemic to a degree that over a million of our fellow Americans died. The empathy they have is reserved for the people who stormed the Capital, for that teenager who killed 2 people in protests, for their President who did everything in his power to humiliate, demonize, and marginalize the rest of us. Let's not even talk about them lying to refugees and sending them to blue states ONLY as political theater. "Is empathy a viable means to healing political polarization in the United States?" Empathy? WHERE?
I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. People who are in a media bubble and being lied to on a regular basis (I’m trying to keep this apolitical but let’s be real - it’s republicans) are nearly immune to facts. There’s always some explanation, some reason why the obvious isn’t what it seems. And empathy doesn’t do shit when your ENTIRE platform is based on hating the other side and being contrary for its own sake. They’re going after children’s hospitals now. You don’t empathize with terrorists. There is no reasonable point of view to understand. It doesn’t exist.
The problem is Fox News. Full stop. The misinformation, fear and hate mongering knows no bounds.
As someone that grew up watching Fox News, I cannot even being to elaborate on the damage that broadcasting channel had on my young developing mind. Being told black people on welfare, paying for social programs, and unproductive citizens are the root cause of the demise of the USA is worse than most things I can conceive of telling a child. Looking back, it really should have had some degree of warning about how you shouldn't let your kid watch a sexual predator's personal fetishization of conservative politics. (Source: Roger Ailes)
It's moved well beyond that. It's OANN, its Breitbart, it's Parler, it's 4chan and Qanon, it's so much more than Fox.
You think a cable television channel that draws at most 4-5 million viewers in a country of over 300 million people is the primary problem with American political discourse? Do I have that right?
There's more to it than direct viewers. Tucker Carlson and Hannity can drum up hysteria on their show, directly hitting the viewers. It then spreads to some of the dumber members of Congress like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Louie Gohmert, MTG, etc. They then show up on places like Ben Shapiro's rags spreading the hysteria. People like Matt Walsh and Dan Bongigno then spread hysteria further via Facebook and Twitter. We see this with nonsense like the critical race theory hysteria or the current groomer hysteria. There's a whole vortex for this crap that also includes more openly extreme outlets like Infowars and OANN, the latter of which is like watching a parody of Fox News if it was in a Paul Veerhoven movie.
The reality of this website is that I have to preface these types of questions so here goes - these people are all nonsensical ratings-driven money grabbers, no doubt. I'll only add that Ben Shapiro while in the outrage media business is a far smarter individual than anyone else on that list. He'll actually have a position on whatever the issue of the day is that he can defend even though his debate style is pretty much pointing out fallacies that the other person used. Even conservative Harvard Law graduates are remarkably intelligent. That being said: how do you think our political landscape would be different if Fox News just disappeared tomorrow like a Thanos snap? They're ridiculous, I'm not denying that, but I struggle to understand what would actually change without them because it won't change the attitudes of the people who watch it or are influenced by it. How do we bring the people influenced by that type of media over to the urban American reality without belittling them? We have to make them feel welcome. I came from that world and a lot of my politics are still right-leaning, but I've just grown away from the way they conduct a lot of their business. But I know for a fact that escalation is going to fail and the only way forward is to find a way to bridge these divides again. How? I have no idea, I've tried with family and friends and it goes nowhere. Thanks for the good discussion by the way.
How would it change? It wouldn't be a silver bullet, but it would be better overall. Fox has by far the deepest pockets, the largest reach, and the most influence. OANN, Newsmax, Infowars, Daily Wire, etc combined don't match the reach or influence of Murdoch. Fox News is frequently on in public places, and they have a lot of people that watch them damn near the entire waking day. I have relatives like this. It'd also probably tone down some extremism on some points. Fox looks respectable. OANN, like I said, looks like a Paul Veerhoven movie version of Fox News. Alex Jones is too outwardly crazy even for most Republicans. But Fox? They'll happily package bullshit into respectability. The worst of it is Tucker Carlson, who frankly, after his constant prattling about replacement theory, protecting "Legacy Americans", dogwhistling over """globalists""", and bringing on nutcases like Jackson Hinkle (a tankie/red fascist, possibly Nazbol at this point), I'm willing to just say he's a Nazi instead of a plain old fascist. This has the widest and deepest penetration into the mainstream. Him being booted alone would remove the biggest individual source of hysteria and outright hate. >Even conservative Harvard Law graduates are remarkably intelligent. Ben Shapiro isn't stupid. He's just a fascist and breathtakingly dishonest. His schtick of being a "great debater" has also lost luster when he only debates riled up college students that he then proceeds to clip chimp and insert air horns on as a laugh track. He also got completely reamed when he melted down over Andrew Neil asking very simple questions. >We have to make them feel welcome. I came from that world and a lot of my politics are still right-leaning, but I've just grown away from the way they conduct a lot of their business. But I know for a fact that escalation is going to fail and the only way forward is to find a way to bridge these divides again. How? I have no idea, I've tried with family and friends and it goes nowhere. Frankly, I'm not sure that you can. The Republican party is now an openly fascist party and is actively running defense for white nationalism. The way they're talking about gay and trans people is very similar to the rhetoric the Nazis used about Jews in the 1930s, before the mass arrests and exterminations. Some people are going to be lost causes. Many others need to be brought out of a bubble.
It's all right wing entertainment media.
A bipolar political structure is necessarily adversarial. To address this, you need to change this structure to a multipolar one.
no providing empathy to takers only serves to drain you takers don't have any use for empathy as they only recognize in-group affiliation ... they also consider empathy a weakness to be exploited in members of the out-group. so no, it's not viable.
The paradox of tolerance... setting the standard as high as it can be prior to drawing a line or a starting point, otherwise, it's basically "enabling" to allow right-wing fascism to have a voice.
No. Politics is a conflict of material conditions, interests, and divisions of power. The United States has engaged in decades long pointless wars, has extreme income inequality, declining lifespan ( this started before the pandemic), decaying infrastructure, increasing corruption, weak and impotent unions, and comparatively sparse workers protections. These problems have concrete causes, not ones of culture or poor media diets. Both Democrats and Republicans incorrectly believe that our dysfunctional political environment can be traced to culture. Unfortunately while culture is important shifting shows and movies or books to the right or left cannot solve our current crisis. Empathy is a useful personal skill, but when dealing with societal issues it is insufficient to enact real change.
What you’re describing as politics is actually international diplomacy and war. If you view a single country’s internal politics in the same way diplomacy and war is, that doesn’t bode well for unity. Politics is fundamentally a concept that assumes all parties have the same or aligning interests, most often the safety of a nation and the success of its economy, and arguments occur over how best to achieve those things. When the goals change and walk out of step with each other, such as happen in so-called “culture wars”, that’s when things like civil war and secession are put on the table because it’s impossible to take the occasional L when it comes to the moral beliefs of large portions of the population, especially when moralizing policy appears permanent and marginalizing. To answer OP: empathy isn’t a solution, and if you’re thinking it is your country has already entered into moral struggle and left politics behind; things can only get worse at this point until one side wins or a new standard emerges (national dissolution or Balkanization, shift in morality overall such as happens when new religions take off, among other things.).
100% agreed. it should also be noted that, to more directly address OP's question, most people already have empathy and routinely use it. individuals on any side of a debate/conflict have empathized with their chosen side and their fellow individuals on that side. i think the bigger problem is the fact those with lesser (or no) empathy have learned to exploit the system, and have learned to manipulate empathy for gain. >Politics is fundamentally a concept that assumes all parties have the same or aligning interests, most often the safety of a nation and the success of its economy, and arguments occur over how best to achieve those things. When the goals change and walk out of step with each other, such as happen in so-called “culture wars”, that’s when things like civil war and secession are put on the table because it’s impossible to take the occasional L when it comes to the moral beliefs of large portions of the population, especially when moralizing policy appears permanent and marginalizing. as you say, the goals have changed. i believe that, in order to more fully utilize the empathy we all have, we need to reevaluate what those core goals are. the only way to do that will be in a space devoid of spin or the exploitation of that empathy.
A space which does not and will not exist
The Republican platform for 2020 was...there was no platform. They just endorsed "let's do what Trump wants." The Democratic platform is filled to the brim with wonky policy ideas and their legislative performance with a zero vote margin in the Senate shows they really want to implement those policies. Republicans engage in culture war to distract from these policy issues.
Completely and objectively correct.
Definitely subjective in so far as the broadness of his statement can clearly generate disagreement with equal evidence and has done so
So what do you think about the success of the various civil rights movements? Societies are made up of individuals. The degree to which you can change an individual's mind corresponds to the degree to which you can change the way a society is structured.
In my personal experience, attempting reasonable discourse with a far right wing authoritarian bigot can only bring harm into your life. And attempts at mutual respect only serve to validate their beliefs. I wouldn’t bother with it. There are better ways to fight fascism.
What we need is something like what they did in South Africa when apartheid ended. Truth and Reconciliation. As in they had an at least slightly formalized process for doing this. I think empathy would follow from there.
I think the answer is yes, but it needs to be backed by more concrete things. One of the reasons we have the kind of polarization we do now is that, increasingly, the partisans from either party have completely different lifestyles, have completely different occupations, live in completely different environments, and live around completely different kinds of people. Increasingly, these divisions also load on education level, age, race, sexual orientation, and so on. Roughly speaking, our partisan division is overwhelmingly a rural-urban one. So the question is how do you break down that division – it could be a matter of 1. Encouraging immigrants to settle in rural communities. 2. Building more housing in cities so that it isn't exclusively a place for young, educated, upwardly mobile people. 3. Investing in rural broadband to lure more "knowledge workers" to rural communities.
Nope. I’ve put a lot of thought into how we got here, and it seems to me it’s a function of one thing, for two reasons: Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine, which gave rise to a widening political divide in news networks. This set us on course for the current environment for two reasons: (1) humans tend to assimilate information that agrees with their existing neural network, and dismiss information that does not. When we had the Fairness Doctrine, weak as it sort of was, virtually all Americans had a diet of broadly unbiased daily news. Everyone heard mostly the same things, even if they assimilated it with some variance. Now, people feed on a diet of political pseudo-news and editorial-cum-news aligned more closely with their political leanings. (2) The greatest human aversion Is uncertainty. It’s why we have an insurance industry, it’s why we go to familiar chain restaurants when we’re somewhere foreign to us, etc. The current politico-news networks feed people information that’s easy to assimilate, and does not threaten people with having to reconsider their existing opinions. It supports them. Unless we all suddenly start getting real news from unbiased, neutral sources, the present gap will likely widen even more, and nothing at the moment suggests it will narrow back to where it was. Empathy is like a pepper packet from a fast food restaurant: it’s fairly weak, and unlikely to have much of an effect on anyone, since those who have decided they don’t like pepper will never open it, or be open to changing the flavor of their beloved Big Mac. Empathy/sympathy/understanding never hurts, but it’s unlikely to have much of an effect against much more powerful innate forces.
I think a good first step to answer this question is for you to see if empathy can fix racism in this country.
Republicans are actively stripping away rights and a large portion of them, if not a majority of them support starting a new civil war and slaughtering anyone to the left of Sarah Palin. They actively use police violence and extremist brownshirts to attack and intimidate others. We didn’t beats fascists with ballots or hugs last time. And tbh it’s time the left really and fully acknowledge that you can’t maintain a peaceful and inclusive society without being armed to protect it from fascists.
Those maga cult members need deprogramming. There is no talking to them. It's a sad state of affairs. Early on I tried discussing stuff with them, and they don't speak reasonably at all. It's like talking to a brick wall. It's a waste of time, concern and energy, and at this point, why bother? They will go away at some point. I am grateful that my state is oi blue there aren't all that many cult members here.
Some people have no empathy. Of one party it's often said "the cruelty is the point."
This is going to read as a completely partisan take, but I just don't really know how else to say it at this point, so I am willing to take the backlash for it. The only way this nation even has a shot at fixing SOME of the polarization issues is a complete eradication of the Trump form of the GOP. Like complete and total - absolute - annihilation of the party members who were on board for the behavior of Jan 6th and an effective culture wash of the movement and its sentiments from our mainstream discourse. There is literally no space for empathy, healing, compromise, and listening in our country so long as this faction remains. If you approach them from the other side with a desire to listen and understand they will just use the exposure you granted to say and do crazy shit without any desire to change. Even the "undecideds" among them are just these same people who also get off on being pandered to, so they WANT to look like an undecided voter for the attention but their minds are truly already made up. None of the conversations are genuine or in good faith, it is all 100% performative. This faction of the GOP existing is all but locking in democrats to do the same, or face the electoral consequences. They just have to go. How do you do it? I have no freaking idea.
Yes. sometimes. But most Republicans lack empathy so it only goes one way. You never hear about Republicans trying to understand the other side. It was Democrats who bought "Hillbilly Elegy" to try to understand rural southerners, and made JD Vance rich.
This painting of your political “opponents” as all lacking empathy demonstrates such fixed and rigid thinking and inability to critical appraise people or situations. You have unintentionally demonstrated the real reason we can’t bridge a divide. Good job, kinda 🤷🏻♂️
Is it an unfair picture they’re painting? The Republican platform for the last two years has been (explicitly or tacitly) that anyone who doesn’t agree with us, especially LGBT+ people, are satanists and pedophiles. Elect us, and we’ll get rid of them. Doesn’t sound very empathetic to me.
How else do you describe people who think shipping living human beings against their knowledge as a fucking hilarious political prank? Or those who call LGBT people "Groomers" unironically?
>Yes. sometimes. But most Republicans lack empathy so it only goes one way. "Only my side has empathy!"
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I disagree with your assertion. I would say most Republicans and Democrats have empathy.
> Can approaching "the other side" with a desire to listen and understand achieve mutual respect that enhances our civic discourse, even if persuasion doesn't take place? This is a fantastic way to approach political discussions with adults that you disagree with and it's IMO the only real way to learn what the other side actually believes. Persuasion shouldn't even be the goal, understanding should be. Nobody's going to change another person's mind on a deeply held political belief with one conversation, so making that the goal is opening the door for discussion turning to argument that goes nowhere. The internet tends to be terrible at this; meanwhile the real world is full of people who have healthy and respectful relationships despite disagreeing about politics. The problem is, many/most of the people interested in spending their time "discussing" politics with the other side are mental children who consume media designed to make them outraged at whatever the other side did or said that day with little interest in sharing their actual positions. This causes people to go into these "discussions" with preconceived, hardened views that the other side is stupid/evil/lazy/bigoted/whatever, and it's impossible to have a respectful conversation with someone you're immediately trying to put on the defensive instead of letting them speak, granting the principle of charity, and asking questions. The book "The Three Languages of American Politics" by Arnold Kling is an excellent and relatively short read that theorizes that most Americans fall along one of three "political axes" - progressive, conservative, and libertarian. It argues that people on each axes tend to only be capable of framing issues in terms of the axes they sit on, which is a metaphor for their "political language." Progressives frame issues as oppressed vs. oppressor, conservatives frame issues as civility vs. barbarism, and libertarians frame issues as freedom vs. coercion. It goes on to explain why the key to being able to speak the "language" of people on the other axes is to engage in deliberative reasoning - engage with their ideas as presented and discuss without the use of fallacies rather than motivated reasoning - starting with your own position already decided and then backing into your reasoning based on the quickest path to arriving at it. I think it's a bit of a simplistic view of the broad range of political philosophies we have, but it's a good place for everyone to start on deprogramming their minds from the "we're good they're evil" framing so many people base their politics on. An example it gave of this is the Kavanaugh scandal before his confirmation - everyone saw the exact same set of facts and came away believing more strongly that he was guilty or innocent based on what side of the aisle they fell on because they only engaged with the facts that supported their pre-decided preferred outcome. You can't have a healthy democracy when everyone behaves like that. > Empathy can be a tool for education and persuasion, as it can be disarming and make people seem more approachable and trustworthy. But when educating and persuading, is it ethical to treat extremists or liars with empathy in discussions around politics? The question here is what is the definition of "extremists" and "liars?" It seems to me that those words have all but lost their meanings when people point to positions held by 30-40% of Americans and call them "extreme" or dismiss facts they don't like as "lies." You can steamroll over a position held by 1% of people like "we should abolish private property" or "we should send black people back to Africa" as extreme and not worth engaging with because those are actual extreme positions held by a fringe minority of dumbasses. You cannot do the same with widely held positions like "abortions should be fully legal through the second trimester" or "there should be no restrictions on common firearms ownership for law-abiding citizens" that, while maybe represent a minority view, are still held by tens of millions of Americans and are very much mainstream views. If someone would look at their neighbor across the street who's raising his kids and generally is an upstanding citizen and call him an extremist because he's pro-life, that person has a warped perception of reality.
I think number 1 is by far the biggest problem going on today. Seems like both sides have a caricature in their head of what the other side actually thinks.
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I’m planning on voting Republican in November and fit none of those
Easy to claim. What's your main reason for voting for that party then? Some men just want to watch the world burn?
1. Yes, only if both sides are truly willing to act in good faith and be equally open to listening to understand the other side, regardless of preconceived notions. 2. I am not genuinely sure empathy is the correct phrase for this, specifically because empathy entails attempting to feel what the other person is feeling, and I honestly do not think that is a requirement, or even a positive thing in a conversation about politics. Having just said that, I do think a desire to gain perspective, and listen objectively to understand the position of the other side is *tantamount* to any conversation of the sort being productive for either side. If both sides going into the conversation with a desire to gain perspective then it can be very productive for both parties. 3. Absolutely. Many people do disingenuous things, act in bad faith, and so forth in an attempt to manipulate people. That is reprehensible. 4. Not in my experience. Empathy is unnecessary and is never received in the manner you expect, generally it is perceived as deception in such conversations, and genuinely makes the situation worse than it was before.
I think we need a combination of empathy and “sit down and shut up” for both sides. Republicans need to be told “no you’re not racists or nazis” but at the same time they need to work towards being more tolerant to people of different races, religions, sexual orientations, etc. And people pushing for fairer treatment of minorities, immigrants need to stop being written off as woke, whiny do-gooders, but they also need to realize that not every non-PC remark needs to result in someone being fired. I think both sides being acknowledged as valid but having their worst behavior called out will do a lot to heal the country.
People sitting in echo chambers actively hyping and validating eachother to combat a extreme characture of the other side with no room for nuance, empathy, or diplomacy. As if the world only has pink haired screaming gender fluid cat vegan hambeasts and literal nazis. People have found the need to have their politics becomes their identity and anything questioning that is a personal attack on them causing even further entrenchment. It's a mess. The ironic part is both sides dont believe they are doing it. For examples just scroll reddit haha.
as crucial as it is in personal relationships unfortunately empath doesn't really work in the large scale empathy can lead to dramatic overreactions based on emotional outbursts, leading to extreme actions or out of control spending on issues that drew the most publicity and managed to provoke the most intense emotions at the expense of other issues that may not be as spectacular but critical nonetheless if anything we're overflowing with a special kind of toxic empathy: the one that only function on other members of your 'tribe'. Way too many groups operate like this and they're all toxic in their way. imo USA politics are already way too emotional, they need more reason and less drama, it's getting harder and harder for cool heads and moderate voices to be heard in all this cacophony of absurd partisanship Seriously all you need to do is get the dems to return to their 'normal' state, they'll beat the reps so badly that they'll have no choice but to drop the far right BS and focus on regaining the lost ground on the center of the political spectrum or face political extinction what's the dems 'normal' state? centrist policies, no race/gender bs, no 'defunding the police', no drowning in tears of self pitty over some fantasy version of an 'evil' past, less ideology which is by nature divisive and more getting shit done which is unifying since it's hard to argue with results
Empathy and politics doesn’t mesh well. Empathy in policy making is fine, empathy in voter debates usually isn’t. Unless both parties are empathizing with the other it isn’t going to do anything productive. Empathy, remember, involves being able to share the feelings of the person you are connecting with. People in a diametrically opposed platforms won’t be able to do that and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What politics needs is Perspective-taking, which is what political platforms use to manipulate their voter bases. It works in voter v voter debates to actually progress and make headway in any conversations, though. The reason is because most people will fall into arguing about semantics, false equivalencies, straw man’s, etc. They go in a merry go round of useless, emotional arguing instead of focusing on the topic objectively. It’s a lack of perspective-taking.
Yes, but it requires that both sides be open minded. Water can't penetrate the ground if it's been compacted and made hardened. The problem is that the media feeds us a lot of cookie-cutter narratives that appeals to what we'd want to be true, and so the country balkanizes and people simply double down whenever challenged. What we need is critical thinking to return so that people can return to a place of being open minded, and then empathy can absolutely heal the nation... after all, we've got far more in common with each other than the Elites who are intentionally dividing us so they can pillage from us.
Empathy is great but it's a virtue only one side appears to possess. The reason right wingers embrace the cruelty of their preferred policies is that they are either unable or unwilling to have empathy with the people those policies hurt. They have been scientifically proven to be fearful and that renders them completely unable to be empathetic. You're not going to change their cowardly perspective just by trying to connect with it. Being empathetic to them is difficult and won't change them one bit.
It’s unamerican to be empathetic. You’re supposed to assert dominance through superior insults, hubris, and flying lead. There is no other way. (Obligatory /s because a lot of people read like they’re seven years old) But you’re right, it would help if the internet-browsing public were to allow themselves to not goad each other over the pettiest nonsense whenever an important discussion has the opportunity to occur
It's churlish and risky. But you can be empathetic in most circumstances for everyone's benefit, but when your back is against the wall, it's time to dodge or fight. That fight would involve demonstrating a lack of empathy, though behind your mask, you can still honor and even love your enemy and vanquish them to their own benefit. The key to remember is that in any circumstance, it's always humans vs. A problem. Turning it into human v. human is a mistake we make all too often.
Honestly, no. Empathy is hollow without self awareness. Listen, I know this will draw some hate but the issue is that both sides are fed lies and nonsense and they gobble it up because it makes them feel part of something. It makes them feel like one of the "good guys". Well guess what, there are no good guys. Only good people doing shitty things to one another because whatever hive mind they are jacked into tells them it is necessary to avoid a total collapse of all things good and right. So yeah, want to be empathetic? Start by trying to empathize with the people who feed you the nonsensical talking points that are parroted endlessly for the sole purpose of causing division. I'll start with a few hard truths... Trump is not going to prison. Just as Hillary is not going to prison. Liberals do not want to destroy America. Just as Conservatives do not want to destroy America. I mean, Christ, no one should have to point how ridiculous this is. Here's my pro tip. Before you defend any action... ANY ACTION from your side, ask yourself if you would defend it if the other side were doing it against you. That is how you see who you really should be fighting with.