Empathy for the devil.
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“If you learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
This is a line from my favourite novel ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’, spoken by a father, Atticus Finch, to his daughter Scout, the protagonist and narrator in the book.
The novel’s central themes are deep racial prejudice and injustice in 1930s Alabama, and it tells the story of a white lawyer (Atticus) defending a black man who is wrongly accused of the rape of a white woman. I was fortunate enough to read this book at school, at the age of 15. I say fortunate because it changed my life and my understanding of the world at a formative age.
I read the book again, 20 years later, and found it just as powerful. I think it’s a masterpiece, one that took me into a world completely different from mine yet made it utterly recognisable. It is, at its core, a book about what it is to be human, and its power lies in being able to place us, just like Atticus suggested, in someone else’s shoes.
This is the essence of empathy, something that I believe might be the most misunderstood trait in mainstream culture. Empathy as a capacity to “infer the mental state or the emotional status of other individuals” is an essential social trait.
It is believed that mirror neurons play a key role in this, with one person’s neurons unconsciously firing in the same patterns as the person they are communicating with. The result of these neurobiological processes, empathy, means we are able to cultivate understanding and therefore relationship with another.
When I hear empathy mentioned in conversation though, it is usually invoking a slightly different idea, that empathy necessarily involves the taking on of someone else’s emotions, to the extent that one is almost experiencing what they are experiencing, feeling it in unison.
Common cultural understandings of empathy also extend this to a sense of feeling positive emotions or care for the other person - the kind of stuff we see in films where a couple hold hands and look into each others tear filled eyes, or a therapist is deeply moved by a patient and seeks to comfort them.
These images are certainly a portrayal of empathy but what they really show is a potential outcome of empathy, which is compassion. In Buddhism, compassion (karuna) is defined as the desire to alleviate the suffering of another. This is not the same as empathy and the distinction is important.
In a former life, I used to work as a consultant in technology and startups, including for a couple of startups. I learned a lot about product development, user experience and design thinking, practices that are core to not just technology products but pretty much every successful product or service, and the world of marketing.
To design a successful smartphone app for instance, first requires a deep understanding of a real need or problem that the app will serve. This includes completely superfluous ‘needs’ like games.
“I believe it is the unimaginative among us, those incapable of appreciating the dark side of make-believe, who have been responsible for most of the world’s woes.”
— Stephen King
A tech founder and the teams that build products will spend a lot of time looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, asking questions like ‘What is most annoying about travel?’ or ‘What do people want to spend less money on when on holiday?’. Companies like Uber and Airbnb were conceived from this kind of empathy.
You might be wondering how Uber can be considered a service based on empathy - and this is where understanding empathy gets interesting.
Some people feel that Uber’s business model is exploitative and unethical. Other people, millions of them, feel it is a great solution to a problem. The latter group don’t particularly care about the former group (and the latter also includes many Uber drivers), and the service is built on empathising with this group.
Empathy here is not empathy for everyone, nor is it necessarily ethical. You might, at a stretch, deem it compassionate depending on how much suffering you feel is present in ordering a taxi.
It gets more interesting when you look at products that most people would consider unethical or a net negative for society. Take vapes. The companies behind them, many of them big tobacco, were able to understand that smoking was becoming less popular. At the same time, they understood that many smokers wished to quit but the current products to help them do that were more like medicine - nicotine patches, gum and so on.
Vapes met this need. They continue to give people a nicotine hit but without tobacco and the toxins that come with burning it. What’s more, this new product allowed for a range of flavours, styles and the ability to blow large plumes of smoke out of your mouth - it feels way more enjoyable than chewing nicotine gum, to the extent that even non-smokers have taken up vaping.
In my view, they’re an awful product. Terrible for people and for the environment. But they exist because of empathy. Once again, this is the difference between understanding a person’s perspective and actually caring about them. The two can be entirely separate things.
To hold these two positions can be difficult. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the critical thinking skills most lacking in modern society, and the current divisions we see around us are evidence of this. These divides have been widened and exploited by powerful people of course, and those people themselves have empathy - or at least enough empathy for certain groups of people, to win their support.
Take Brexit or the growing social and political divides in the UK and the US. The people who have triumphed in recent years and are gaining more and more power are those who are able to understand enough of what people desire, what they are struggling with and what they are fearful of. With this understanding, they can speak to these needs in a way that no-one else is.
In this sense, authoritarian and fascist leaders have a specific kind of deep empathy in that they know what certain people care about and are motivated by, to the extent that they can persuade a large enough constituency that electing them is the solution to their ills.
“Where does it hurt?”
— Ruby Sales
Sure, they are not going to meet people’s needs or make their lives better - far from it. Populism is about winning support, not about solving difficult social problems. It is a powerful demonstration, though, of how lacking empathy has been from mainstream politics. This is not a new phenomenon (the 1930s come to mind), but it is our reality now.
But if empathy has been the weapon used in deepening these divides, it is also a tool for bridging them. This is where empathy becomes most difficult, yet most essential - can I sit with someone with whom I fundamentally disagree with on issues I care about, or someone who might even hate who I am, and still listen to them, attempting to hear where they’re coming from?
This is Jedi-level stuff for many of us, buffeted and dragged as we are by our own stories, emotions and biases, as well as fear of what might happen.
At the same time, it is not as difficult as we think. It is a practice, an ongoing one and we can start now - with our partners, kids, friends and colleagues. You can try it by thinking of a person or group of people who you have fundamentally different ideas to. Where might they be coming from? What have their life experiences been? What does the world look and feel like for them? Who and what taught and shaped them?
“We are often reluctant to empathize with someone else’s point of view because we worry that by doing so we are legitimizing and encouraging their position and downplaying our own.”
— Shirzad Chamine
Consider a boy who, at 2 years old, is distanced from his hospitalised mother, who almost dies due to health issues. She is absent from his life for part of this formative period, and quite harsh with him in later years, questioning his intelligence and capability. The family has significant wealth, which has been accrued in dubious and sometimes illegal ways.
The boy’s father, meanwhile, is a brutal man, apparently a sociopath, a deeply unethical businessman and certainly a racist. The boy develops a strong attachment to him and idolises him, despite how insecure and inadequate this makes him feel. The father, along with a business associate, mentors the boy in the ‘dark arts’ of business and making money.
These are the beginnings and fuel for this boy’s later life as an adult. This boy becomes Donald J. Trump.
“To discover ourselves, we must step outside ourselves and find out how other people think, live and look at the world. Empathy is one of our greatest hopes for doing so.”
— Roman Krznaric
Tipping Point: navigating collapse and crisis.
“Conspiracy theories are part of the dance of power. Often, those drawn to conspiracy think they’re regaining power by uncovering the truth of the story. Because knowledge, knowledge of what’s really going on, that must be power, right? And yes, knowledge is power. But there’s only one problem. That’s not knowledge. Knowledge is not something you read about on the internet and fit into an abstract worldview about distant, faraway powers. Knowledge is not a hot take or an aha moment about Jewish space lasers. Knowledge is something that’s earned slowly, somatically, in context.”
Josh Schrei’s masterful exploration of power.
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
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