Empathy is one of those words thrown around in college dorms. In bars. In private moments. It literally means “in feeling,” and is the ability to share another person’s emotions and feelings. The English word is derived from the Greek word empatheia (“physical affection, passion, partiality”) which comes from en (“in, at”) + pathos (“feeling”).
“Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double -minded focus of attention,” writes Simon Baron-Cohen in The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty.
According to Baron-Cohen, single-minded means what it sounds like: we’re thinking only about ourselves and our own thoughts, our own minds. Double-minded attention “means we are keeping in mind someone else’s mind at the very same time.”
The author writes about how when he was seven, his father told him that the Nazis turned Jews into lampshades. Into bars of soap. His father also told him “about a former girlfriends, Ruth Goldblatt, a whose mother had survived a concentration camp. He had been introduced tlo the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. Nazi scientists had severed Mfrs. Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around, and sewn them back on again.”
Imagine that. It meant that when she put her hands out, palms facing down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside.
These horrific incidents are glaring examples of zero empathy, which Baron-Cohen theorizes may be the origin of cruelty. Nazis saw Jews as objects. The neighbor who keeps his dog on a six-foot leash outside as a hurricane approaches, sees the animal as an object, no different than a clothesline, a car, a nail.
In contrast, you see a stray kitten or dog, thin and limping around in your neighborhood, and you’re compelled to take it in, feed it, maybe even adopt it.
A friend is going through a divorce or has just lost someone close to them. You help however you can.
An empathic person feels what you feel.
And it’s this quality that seems to be missing from American culture as in 2023. How do we fix this?
In retrospect, it seems that trump tapped into the dark side of the American psyche. Suddenly, it was okay to be racist, to look at people of other cultures as invaders, enemies to be reckoned with. Suddenly, it was okay to be in a store, any kind of store, and get pissed about something and tell the clerk to fuck off. Suddenly, it was okay to be on a flight and give the flight attendant shit about something and punch her in the mouth.
During the pandemic, there were triggers – mask and vaccine mandates, Covid and all the conspiracy theories.
Trump is the classic individual without empathy. Everything was about him. It still is. For nearly two years now, his litany about a stolen election continues. Recently, he stated the constitution has to be dismantled.
Twice a month, we post an episode of The Mystical Underground on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland. One of the recent episodes was of Trish reading the introduction of our newest book The Shift: Reports from the Mystical Underground. In the intro, we introduce the concept that we – humanity – are in the midst of a paradigm shift. A commenter left this:
“At the risk of being labeled here, democracy is at risk when citizens will be fired from their jobs or discharged from the military if they don’t get vaccinated. In the end, more people died that were vaccinated than were not; young males who didn’t really need the vaccination have developed myocarditis. The pandemic was about control and they, the powers that be, want you to know that.”
Our reply?
We’d love to see the statistics you have on this. In other words, what are your sources? Newsmax? Truth social? Fox News?
Silence on the other end.
Google it. We did. Here’s one article we found.
