226 Comments

Thank you for a thoughtful and insightful article.

Empathy is a basic and useful emotion when genuine , however it has been hijacked by some “special interest(professional victim) groups, because as you point out, it is very easy for emotionally toxic and cynical people to exploit, and essentially gain power over many people, who while genuine in their empathy, are not very discriminating and these two elements have to be balanced to be effective.

Unfortunately many empathic people do not recognise the transactional nature of their empathy. To wit : the people who receive their empathy get attention they would not otherwise get and feel justified, important, etc and the people exercising their empathy get a feeling of moral satisfaction (irrespective of whether their empathy is justified in a given case or even genuine).

In the west currently, sadly such “empathy” has become the norm. In reality it is a sort of mental illness infecting both givers and receivers of its maleficent influence and is used by the cynical for their benefit.

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Excellent analysis. You are one of the best cultural critics of the moment. I would just add the blank-slatism is simply another version of the progressive idea that there is no human nature.

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there is no such thing as nature, period. ugh

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said the "eco-stalinist." One would think that "eco" has something to do with nature. But it probably has to do more with "echo."

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would you like to actually read my pitch?

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to address your immediate misapprehension, there is nothing 'natural' about nature, and any attempt to base a politics on any concept of the 'natural' is fascist.

as for the eco-stalinism - capitalism is a mass extinction event, son. there's your 'nature' for you, ya?

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A "pitch" is the invention of a capitalist mind and the idea that there is no such thing as nature is also an invention of Western capitalists. If you told anyone in the non Western world that nature doesn't exist, they would think you are crazy. Btw, I grew up in a non-Western, communist world, and it's always funny to see capitalists who can't understand any other world think that they are "anticapitalists." Everything about you is capitalist: your logic, your concepts, your ideas.

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you don’t understand anything about me kid. you haven’t read my work.

there is no such thing as nature. it’s a symbolic construct. just like god. you need to interrogate your concept of nature within 21c materialist contexts.

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Excellent piece Gurwinder breaking down the irrationality behind women backing murderers. Empathy applied inappropriately is the main issue behind these women who feel an affinity to these men. These men are psychopaths whose lack of remorse for murdering their parents without clear evidence of child abuse should have been the glaring red flag to everyone. The inappropriate empathising with murderers is one aspect- the emotional contagion that captures hearts and minds is the other. These irresponsible documentaries glorifying so called innocent victims of their own premeditated actions is how the narratives held in the emotional contagion spreads.

These boys believe so much in their entitlement to freedom despite their cold blooded actions that they’ve groomed a team of enablers and champions who have tapped into their strong belief via misguided empathy. The take home message for me is this is what happens in a world when everyone allows feelings to guide actions without the input of critical reasoning and analytical skills.

I look forward to your next piece on Luigi.

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Empathizing with murderers seems to be the flavor of the week. It’s mind boggling what I’m witnessing over the last few weeks.

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Same folks who have been empathising with Islamic terrorists for the last year and a bit. Maybe they got a bit bored, or perhaps confused by the images of Syrians celebrating their liberation from the “resistance axis”, so they decided to switch to a different type of murderer.

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Morality is in the dumps. The world is all upside down.

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I’ve been waiting for someone to analyze this deeply. I can’t wait to read the whole thing.

I’ve been encountering this movement on social media. Supposedly, the two men are model citizens in the prison. Everyone who encounters them has nothing but great things to say about them. On the surface, it appears that there’s no reason not to support them given that their debt to society has been paid for over 30 years.

However, I’m ALSO aware that sexuality and maternal instincts play a huge role in many things we women support. 😅 So, I’m skeptical about the nature of this fanfare. Many are romanticizing everything about them, and failing to realize that they’re not the 18 and 21 year old ‘boys’ they were in the trials. They’re middle aged men with wives. That’s what makes it all a bit bizarre. Misplaced maternal energy and ‘pretty privilege’ is in full effect here.

Apart from that, some people are identifying with them because they are also victims of child abuse. I think this is sometimes keeping those people from thinking rationally about why they got the sentences they got.

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We have redefined empathy from "being able to understand the feelings of another" to "advocating others are pure in the face of evidence."

Who did that? Selfish people trying to gain status despite the socialized losses of detaching the world from reality.

No, those people do not have good intentions. If they did, they would examine the evidence and re-evaluate based on that. But they do not. They do not care about detaching the world from reality and the huge problems that come with that. They just care about gaining status.

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Well said

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When I worked in a prison many moons ago, it was common that the most well behaved and pleasant offenders were generally those in for murder and more serious crimes.

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Oh, wow. That’s really interesting. If you don’t mind me asking, what occupation did you work in the prison?

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I was a ‘youth worker’ which was a glorified prison officer or ‘screw’. I carried keys, radio, first aid stuff, all that stuff around the waist, all that jazz.

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Oh, interesting. 😮

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I worked in a county jail in the late 80’s/early 90’s and I noticed the same thing. The murderers were usually quiet, polite and respectful to staff. The biggest assholes were often guys in for pretty minor offenses

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Oh yes that was 💯all the staff’s experience aswell. Even the ones who has worked at other prisons said it was the same there too.

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> "... they are also victims of child abuse ..."

Supposedly ...

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For real. That’s another reason for skepticism. In that space, simply identifying as a victim gives people social currency and complete authority over all other situations of abuse. This is apparent in the “body language expert” sphere as well. You’ll see people saying so-and-so “reminds them of their abuser”, therefore they must be guilty or a narcissist, etc, etc. There’s so much unchecked nonsense on the internet. 😭

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Addendum -- reminds me of seeing, lo these many moons ago, a cartoon, probably in Playboy magazine, that showed a fellow out walking past a newsmagazine kiosk on the street. And the magazines had titles like "Lust", "Envy", "Pride", "Gluttony", "Greed", etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alphonse_Karr

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“Amen” to that.

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The only sexuality element I see here is that sexually abused victims like Menendez brothers should have means to carry out justice against their assaulter. If not through legal means, then through violent self-defense.

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I was referring to the fan-girl behavior around them on social media. Ex: The fawning over their looks from 1989, while failing to realize that they aren’t a boy band.

But in terms of what you said- there’s been a lot of writing on this kind of behavior as well. There’s a saying that when a woman defends this behavior, she is not really defending the man. She’s defending herself because she’s living through him. These brothers did what a lot of passive women wish they could do, so it’s triggering a vicarious power fantasy. They seem to be unable or unwilling to realize that aaaallll the details paint a pretty unflattering picture. They can only see two events- child abuse and the self defense element. That’s it. Any additional information would disrupt their perspective and challenge their claim of unfairness. There’s a lot of binary thinking going on.

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And the fan-boy crap is happening again and is directed toward Mangione.

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I definitely noticed.

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> "There’s a lot of binary thinking going on."

Whole lotta that binary thinkin' goin' on these days, and all over the place too ... 😉🙂

In a note from our sponsor, a major, and majorly problematic, manifestation of that is in the rather demented, at least unscientific, "idea" that everyone has to be either a male or a female, right from conception to death -- if not beyond in both directions.

While the sexes are, by definition, a binary -- i.e., male and female -- that does not mean that those categories, at least as scientific ones, are exhaustive:

From an article at Aeon by philosopher of science, Paul Griffiths:

Griffiths: “Sex Is Real: Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other.”;

https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity

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Right. It’s like… people were educated about these things in childhood using the simplest terms possible. So, they think the subject is simple. They fail to realize that they received a child-level education in the subject only because everyone knew that they could not comprehend a more complicated explanation. So, as adults, they don’t bother to understand that there are more nuanced realities at play. They just didn’t learn about it as children. 😅

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Too many people haven't progressed much beyond the Kindergarten Cop definitions for the sexes: boys (males) have penises and girls (females) have vaginas.

Get totally "discombobulated" when faced with brute facts like people with CAIS or 5ARD syndromes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome#Signs_and_symptoms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_2_deficiency

Scientific, and pigheaded, illiteracy as far as the eye can see ...

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Males and females are very distinct categories. Intersex conditions are DISORDERS in which male and female traits overlap (and which almost always cause infertility or other health problems). If someone is born without arms or legs it doesn't mean that we are not a bi-pedal species. We are. But some people are born with disorders that make them different. Why deny reality?

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So true.

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They were not trapped at their age without a means to escape. They were greedy and spoiled and didn't want to leave their rich life.

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Considering the fact that Lyle was already living away from home, I don’t know why he couldn’t just sneak Erik out the house and have him live with him. If you’re brave and bold enough to rob houses without telling your parents, then you can’t act like you’re too scared to just leave.

They keep trying to use the ‘battered persons syndrome’ defense, but everything they did was premeditated. They also remember everything. So, I don’t see this an example of people who just ‘snapped’.

But anyway, I’m sure their parents were crazy because who else can raise kids who grow up to shoot them to death.

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There was a documentary about the case as well as the docudrama. They got the sentences they got because the first trial was inconclusive as the jury could not reach a unified decision so there had to be a second trial. This time the defence could not put it's case and it was as though the verdict was a foregone conclusion. They did not get a fair trial.

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I think of Empathy as Compassion's younger, narcissistic American sibling.

Prior to the American Century and its global conquest of culture, most people could make do with simple old-fashioned compassion. Love your brother etc, filial piety, someone's sick you bring them food or a doctor, someone's sad you listen to them talk about their problems, a friend or family member needs help and you try to provide it.

But in Empathy it's not enough to be there for someone else and tend to them, you have to magically pour your feelings from your heart into theirs and you have to try to intuit their thoughts and feelings, live inside their brain and skin (an impossibility)—I think this is because Americans get very uncomfortable if they can't bring their SELF along, Americans feel lost and lonely unless they're clinging tightly to their SELVES. It's not enough that you help someone and are kind to them, but you need to feel that extra-special frisson of self-love, of getting to tend to another and to your own feelings simultaneously.

The difference between Compassion and Empathy is the difference between simply helping someone versus getting to watch yourself help someone—you're still the star of the show, you're still the subject and the person you're helping is still an object.

Down with Empathy! It's just another excuse for the lost souls of our therapeutic civilization to talk about themselves and their feelings. There's nothing in Empathy that simple Compassion doesn't do better.

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Ha! Compassion is an action; empathy is an instinct. You can't push empathy; you either have it or you don't. If you have true empathy, you don't fit it into your narrative. Sympathy, on the other hand, is what we are talking about.

I believe the word "empathy" has gone the way of "narcissism" and lost its true meaning. People have bastardized the gift of empathy, distorting its true meaning and reshaping it into whatever aligns with their personal perceptions or agendas, often losing sight of its original purpose: to genuinely understand and share the feelings of others.

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"to genuinely understand and share the feelings of others."

There will always be some corner of my skeptical heart that rebels against this idea—mostly because I've realized that there are so many of my own feelings that lie deeply submerged, that conscious feeling is really just the visible tip of a much bigger psychic iceberg, and so if I have this limitation for myself, I certainly must have it even more strongly when it comes to others.

And this is also why I rebel against the idea of "Empathy"—it strikes me as unnecessarily presumptive and grandiose, and another way people try to manipulate others "with their personal perceptions or agendas", as you say.

But while I'm not sure of the exact difference between compassion and sympathy, I'm all for both, and try to keep them in my heart and thoughts—which is a tough enough job!

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The people telling us that our problem is "toxic masculinity" are in fact guilty of toxic femininity, aka empathy.

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I write extensively on empathy, would consider myself an expert, and I think this is a good piece. That said, there are a couple of things to consider. I look at empathy as information coherence in the communication channel between two agents. It's also a stack -- different parts of the brain operate at different empathic timescales. I yawn, you yawn, I cry, you cry, I perceive, you perceive. And it is very dependent on the emotional and mental development of the actors.

What you're mostly describing here is psychopathic manipulation of this basic function, as well as emotional contagion spread between low development agents in a social network. These characteristic definitions are well accepted in society (as opposed to my far more complex and nuanced interpretation.) The challenge here is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Large scale, network-based psychopathic manipulation is the hallmark of our age. And the Menendez brothers, as well as many lawyers, happen to be good at it.

Regarding Paul Bloom's book, I've already written about this here. As a solid agentic actor, I'll let you make up your own mind on all this. https://empathy.guru/2016/03/27/against-empathy-really/

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About not throwing the baby with the bathwater and large scale, I am interested in your opinion with this idea: Empathy is absolutely necessary for species survival since without it, there wouldn’t be any sense of sacrifice or protection of the young in the tribe (ex: mother fighting for her children). At the first sign of a predator, it would be every man for himself, and the tribe would be destroyed.

You need people to bypass their personal interest for the group to have a chance, and this is Evolution’s way of making us care.

However, our brains never evolved to have this feature be used in a modern, large scale, technologically connected world and it’s become easy to hack empathy, directing it towards people not in our immediate group via fabricated stimulus (social media mostly).

I still think that we cannot get rid of empathy as it’s the basis of our species survival, but it should be limited to people actually in your physical circle irl.

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Empathy/connection, facilitated by attachment, is absolutely necessary in the world of meso-scale predators (which we are.)

People have been hacking empathy in tribal societies, so I'm not sure it's just a problem of modernity. And yes -- empathy is absolutely enhanced by physical presence. We all read faces for good reason.

Good comment.

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“What you're mostly describing here is psychopathic manipulation of this basic function, as well as emotional contagion spread between low development agents in a social network. These characteristic definitions are well accepted in society (as opposed to my far more complex and nuanced interpretation.) The challenge here is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Large scale, network-based psychopathic manipulation is the hallmark of our age. And the Menendez brothers, as well as many lawyers, happen to be good at it.”

Yeah…

I’m a little skeptical of the unstated agenda behind this piece.

Free use of terms like “objective reality” generally are a warning bell.

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I really like Gurwinder's writing, so am very hesitant to cast aspersion. I think empathy in the collective mind is very poorly defined. I had to amalgamate and dig through a ton of articles to come up with my system-oriented, synthesized definition. I don't really know how anyone could argue with the basic fact that the Menendez brothers are manipulating the system, and really argue that human development is anathema to our society. Every advance can always be exploited.

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An interesting view ... I am not an expert. Regardless, I am unconvinced empathy IS coherence in shared communications. I understand one can have cognitive agreement that engages empathetic feelings (i.e we have positive agency with those who share important macro-views). But I doubt this is the evolutionary centrepiece of empathetic feelings for another?

Empathy is more generally an induced (imaginative, or sub consciously triggered) set of negative (or positive ... eg genuinely happy for someone) feelings that create a greater level of connection (more familial or tribal like) and caring about what is happening to an individual or group.

Generally, the degree of empathy for negative events is triggered by the severity, association with problems in our own experience, and underlying genotypic (and developmental) expression via the interacting "stack" of brain regions and relevant life experiene engrams.

I definitely agree about the current effects of low information social networks operating along with current social status elevating effects. A mix of Machiavellian, and genuine but often unbalanced empathy.

My view .. Gurwinder did a great deep dive and reintroduces a more 3rd person analytical style. I believe in the old Yin-Yang view (masculine-feminine, thinking-feeling, self-other, detail-relational, etc).

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You have to decide if we all live inside our own heads, or whether we can understand folks as an aggregated, collective intelligence. That's up to you. If you're in the first camp, then there's not going to be much argument that I can add to your understanding. I use a variation of de Waal's Empathy Pyramid in my work -- if you're interested, here you go. https://empathy.guru/2016/08/06/back-to-basics-updating-the-empathy-model-spiral-dynamics-and-the-fbi-tell-all/

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I fully agree with your point that Paul Bloom is misdefining "empathy" in such a way that risks throwing out the baby. That said, I'm not convinced by your claim of expertise, and your linked essay is marred by ad-hominem attacks, self-coined jargon, and pithiness.

Most importantly, your essay fails to actually throw out the bathwater--that is, to acknowledge and mitigate the ways in which empathy is harmful or exploitable, such as spotlighting and psychopathic manipulation. Regardless of the shortcoming of Bloom's definition, the Menendez case *does* involve real empathy. The social interactions are duplex, as evidenced by the ways that the brothers and their lawyers have responded to public perception.

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I don't care whether you think I'm an expert or not. You can consider the argument. You can search my blog for lots of stuff on psychopaths and empathy. My view on empathy comes from a systemic review and aggregation of a good portion of the entire literature. It has somewhat been done before (see Frans de Waal's eponymous book, The Age of Empathy) -- but I've added to it. But if you don't think I have anything to say, why would you bother? It's semantics to argue whether psychopathic manipulation is real empathy. It certainly isn't a healthy expression. If you believe empathy is all inside someone's head, there's not going to be convincing you of much.

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If you don't care about being perceived as an expert, then don't begin your comment with a claim to expertise.

I did consider the argument. I critiqued it in my last comment for its overuse of ad-hominem attacks, and for its irrelevance to the Menendez case; the case exemplifies empathy by both Bloom's definition and yours, as I understand it.

If you don't think that the Menendez case meets your definition of empathy, then why?

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You're likely a psychopath -- I went back and read that piece I posted, and you had not one criticism of the content. Instead, you had a bogus argument about my expertise (did you pull my CV? Doubt it.) Psychopaths such as yourself always want to send regular folks scurrying to establish their power and control over them. You have to deal with the fact you're not very smart, nor curious. Not me. So you get to win by posting last! But on the very small chance that you're not a psychopath (just an authority-worshipper - you can't seem to debunk any argument in that long piece other than to say "it ain't so") here's a piece on how psychopaths like the Menendez brothers manipulate public opinion. https://empathy.guru/2022/05/16/of-jet-engines-dune-and-psychopaths/comment-page-1/

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"You disagree with me, ergo you must be a stupid, incurious psychopath" is not a very mature way to respond to politely worded disagreement.

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I agree empathy gets abused. But you say you’re less worried about a baby in a well than Global Warming (climate change or whatever you call it this month) is ridiculous. America could do everything to bring zero emissions, but it is not going to matter because other countries are not going to. We breathe the same air and we share the same atmosphere.

I yawn. You cry. Good luck.

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I am a 3rd grade teacher The level of empathy expected from us teachers is climbing off the chart. I may express concern about a child's inability to remain attentive during instruction and the answer from my superiors is that the child has a particular need or disability or diagnosis or disorder that prevents them from remaining attentive -- or able to do their homework or to be kind to other students or to be respectful to adults or classmates or to try harder or to clean up after themselves or to focus or to ... the excuses (in my mind they are excuses) are endless. Granted I am in my late 60s and grew up under an entirely different educational ethos. Has humanity fundamentally altered that much that to expect certain behaviors from children is no longer possible?

I think your essay is dead on, and the answer is no, humanity has not fundamentally altered, but society and its expectations and standards and rewards has.

I will be sharing this. Thank you for writing.

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> "... culture and technology has turned empathy into an emotionally transmitted disease that debilitates thought. Put simply, stupidity has gone viral."

Amen to that. Sympathy for the devil. Though it's often difficult to determine where the fault lies, often "beyond mortal ken".

"Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius (Kill them. For the Lord knows who are His.). This is the origin of the modern phrase: 'Kill them all and let God sort them out.' ...."

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I mean a naive mind is the devil’s playground, no?

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One thing to entertain a thought, quite another to let it in and set up housekeeping ... 😉🙂

Somewhat apropos of which, they say that love is blind but that marriage can be a real eye-opener ... 🙂

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You are quite the writer brother.

This analysis and exploration of misapplications of empathy is quite insightful.

Working in healthcare, I often make the case for rational empathy vs emotional empathy which is the gateway to sympathy.

Like your last point said, spending more time in our own head is imperative.

Rational empathy, attempting to consider a person of interest’s perspective, allows us to consider their story without any emotional attachment. This is obviously more important when trying to help someone in medicine rather than determine credibility in a legal case. That being said, people often lie in healthcare. My attempting to consider their perspective while allowing them to talk at length often reveals the inconsistencies that suggest fiction over getting lost in someone’s delusional or malicious sauce. It takes time and patience, but I believe your post and analysis of the Menedez brother’s case demonstrates rational empathy, dissecting their story unemotionally while considering all the perspectives and of those involved, vs the many people emotionally empathizing and misapplying virtue.

Regardless, your post has me wanting to read Against Empathy and reconsider some aspects of how/when I apply it.

The discussions your post already has generated speaks for itself. You’re exceptional at getting people to think.

Thank you.

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This phenomenon is a fascinating symptom of Phillip Reif's "Therapeutic Man" model of modern humanity. For those of us who see this beast as it is, it matters less if criminals are born or made, and more whether or not they are criminals.

A side note. I know teachers who struggle with students who respond to corrections by bursting into tears and going into soliloquies about their dead grandparents, their sick goldfish, how much stress they're under. etc. These kids have been taught from the cradle that their individual autonomy is nothing but the downstream product of trauma suffered in life. (Mostly trauma which is entirely typical to human existence if you live long enough.) I'm not anti therapy, but the theraputization of the human psyche run amok is stunting young people's ability to mature emotionally. That's a much more dire situation to me than whether or not the Melendez brothers can leverage enough empathy to bust out of jail.

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Reading your stuff makes me frighteningly aware of the quote “if you can’t think for yourself, someone else will think for you”. Another excellent synthesis of a complex concept which my brain hasn’t fully formed. I now think I’ve been confusing compassion with empathy and have come reading to do.

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I've noticed an increasing number of Netflix documentaries that are basically just propaganda. For some reason sociopaths are popular protagonists.

A lot of people give too much credence to something on film marked as a documentary. I'd say that if someone already knows how to seamlessly propagandize, in an apparent documentary format, same someone also knows how to target an audience.

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I knew nothing of this case before reading, that didn't matter as you didn't assume prior knowledge and I've come away feeling informed, what a well written article.

The idea that empathy as a transmittable disease feels very real. The person with the slickest 60 second short video that tugs on just the right strings can sell whatever message they want, true or not and people will lap it up.

I've been susceptible to persuasive writing clouding my judgement and so with the likes of Netflix specials, people have no chance.

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Interesting to read as a male psychologist (yes a minority) who has published about the science of empathy. Yes, empathy is inherently precarious. Some empathise more accurately than others, but it still depends on the situation, how stressed we are and even who we are with. The main reason empathy is precarious is that the minds of others are opaque and never completely readable. And of more relevance to the murderous brothers is another phonemenon: splitting. The biggest provokers of strong feelings - either empathic or hostile are pychopathic criminals and people with complex trauma histories. And yes, both of these could be true of these brothers. But if they were also victims, this in itself would never make them innocent of the crime. We dont like to talk about it, but prisons are full of traumatised people who are guilty of their crime. As you say, empathy is not something that a legal verdict can be based on. And so in the face of strong feelings for and against, the ability of the cold rational approach of the law to establish a verdict is put to test. I guess there is a long history of criminal cases that provoked both empathy and condemnation - some quite recent.

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I think this is an important point.

Notice that the article dismisses the newly discovered evidence and allegations against Jose. (Why would the Menudo band member make this up?).

But regardless of the truth of the allegations, they are guilty of murder! If a child is abused and develops a psychopathic personality in response to early childhood trauma, we don’t absolve them of guilt if they grow up to become a serial criminal. We must protect others from their behavior.

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Lizzie Borden: “She was very unkind to her mother and father.”

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Well-argued. What interests me about cases of this sort is the role of narrative, and how it functions to induce suggestibility, especially when a conclusion is asserted. Stories have an aspect that strongly resembles guided meditation--of being talked through a process ending in a satisfying resolution. Not as an interactive process between writer and reader, or author and audience--more like programming instruction. What I find noteworthy about that aspect of following a story is that I find it easiest to argue with an account presented in textual form. And that's the proper role of a reader, I think. That sort of skepticism and willingness to challenge assertions is also the proper role of an audience to oral witness testimony, of narratives presented in other media--podcast audio, video, or film. But there's also an influence that works at cross-purposes: fictional works of art practically demand that we suspend disbelief and loan our imaginations to the story, granting it a baseline of credence. Folk tales, ghost stories, fictional sagas, videogames--they call on the reader to collaborate with the narrative, not contest it. So do lies. So do con games. So do assumed identities. The ability to tell a tale entertainingly, with colorful details, is a principal asset of con artists. Drama--emotional resonance--commonly appears as an important asset for a false back-story. It engages imagination, appeal to emotion, and empathy, on the part of the listener. And that can even serve to obscure factual discontinuities that might reveal the falsehoods in the tale. An entertainingly dramatic story is something that listeners are prompted to want to believe. That's one of the big takeaways from Walter Kirn's nonfiction book Blood Will Tell, about his years-long friendship with a man who turned out to literally be someone else entirely.

Walter Kirn was gulled by a false narrative by witnessing its live performance--a relatively flawless act, it has to be said, with only a few blatant plot seams that were hastily cleaned up by the con man's boundless capacity to convincingly improvise in the moment. It's much easier to confabulate with the aid of editing provided by A/V media presentation. And that's what's amplified the problem of gullibility so much in recent human history: it's more difficult to engage skeptical inquiry of a video than it is with text. Video loans itself to a default of guided meditation, not critical focus on the most salient facts. A text article--like this post--tends to look a bit propagandistic if it doesn't include specific factual details and then go on with an effort to analyze and interpret their significance. That isn't given the same airing in the video narrative of the Menendez Brothers. Which I watched, noting its sympathy for the imprisoned brothers, while also puzzling over how it is that the sex abuse defense was only raised long after their initial conviction. But the presentation made it seem as if that wasn't a matter for me to determine as a matter of my own reflection; the guiding suggestion of the narrative was to incline the audience to grant it credibility. That's what cameras and editing are able to do so well, with the techniques of quick-cuts, the personal affect and presentation of interviewees, including the defendants, and the selective emphasis of the narrative construction. The argument that the Menendez brothers are guilty can be reduced to a handful of sentences in your essay; for all of your narrative skill, if you were to argue in favor of their innocence, there are a few incontrovertible facts in the content that just cannot be gotten around. They're uncrackable. When I read them, they practically appear in my mind as bold print. And, since this is text, and not video, it's possible to reproduce those factual statements vebatim:

"the brothers initially blamed the murders on the mob, but Erik later confessed to his therapist, Dr. Jerome Oziel, that he and Lyle were responsible." "Their abuse claims only emerged after they met Erik’s second lawyer, Leslie Abramson, several months later." "it wasn’t enough to make the case they’d been sexually abused, because murder committed in revenge for abuse is still murder. Abramson also had to show the brothers believed they were in imminent danger from their parents, and were acting in self-defense. But this claim was disproven by the clear evidence of premeditation – Lyle and Erik forged the paperwork to purchase two shotguns before the shootings – and the fact that, after their first volley of gunfire, while their mother was writhing in her own blood, the brothers left the home so Lyle could reload before returning to finish her off." "not only was there no good evidence the brothers had been in imminent danger, there was also no good evidence they’d been sexually abused." "There was much better evidence the brothers were greedy. Days after the murders, they embarked on an extravagant spending spree, buying Rolexes, Porsches, and even a buffalo wings business. Further, Erik told Oziel he’d feared his father would disinherit him, and Lyle hired a computer expert to delete what was likely his father’s recently updated will, preserving the original 1981 will, which left everything to Lyle and Erik. The brothers had already shown they were willing to commit crimes for money. A year before the murders, they were caught committing a string of burglaries in their Calabasas neighborhood, stealing around $100,000 in goods."

Against those facts, there's no case remaining. Only Performance. Dramatic scripting. Dramatic acting. But video media loves that sort of thing. And video doesn't loan itself to stopping, looking away, reflecting in silence, returning to the claim to see it you read it right. Video narrative carries the audience onward continually, with more pictures than words, as more of an invitation to believe than an invitation to think.

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Very well-said. It's worth noting that even when the facts in the case are disputable (as they've been disputed below by Emma O and others), it's *far* easier to properly follow a debate in text than in video.

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I think delivering verdicts is what trial juries are for, really. The rest of us get summaries. Even with a full video recording, there are cutaway shots and limitations on the ability to monitor the affect of witnesses and defendants, etc.

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Excellent. Thank you.

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