The power of empathy is an idea that is simultaneously talked about way too much while hardly being understood at all.
There’s two things that we get wrong when we speak of using empathy to resolve conflict. We talk about the power of creating understanding between enemies, of creating reconciliation, of building a kind of unity and peace with them that can only come by opening yourself up to one another. This is a real and important thing. Many situations can, in fact, be resolved by careful negotiation and communication, by the power of mutual understanding. Many situations, as well, cannot.
I used to have a great deal of belief in that idea. I used to think that if you truly understood someone you couldn’t hate them, that if we all understood each other we wouldn’t hurt one another. Maybe at some hypothetical grand scale, where everyone shares one perfect mind and holistic understanding, perhaps it could even be true – but at any point short of that it seems now to me to be simply the belief of a person who’s never truly been hurt, a perspective that can only be held with nothing on the line, one who would hate out of principle rather than out of result. Yes, you can hate the man who is drowning you as he holds you under the water, even if you perfectly understand exactly why he’s doing it. You can and you should.
The first thing that this conception of empathy gets wrong is in emphasizing the necessity of empathizing with one’s enemy and thereby building peace. Perhaps one day such a thing could occur, but surely the higher priority must be in building empathy with one’s allies. This may go unsaid due to a presumption that this empathy is assured, a prerequisite for allyship, that any further empathy would be redundant. Of course, one can never tell with perfect clarity who is an enemy and who is an ally – many people who should be allied are not, many people who should be enemies are not. Seeing where these breakdowns happen, understanding the emotional stakes that lead someone to love or hate you, is vital to building any sort of long-term solidarity. Even rock-solid allies may have wildly divergent perspectives on what is necessary or important, and being able to understand and describe these conflicts is going to be a necessary component of that alliance. Surely this capability of empathy should be emphasized at least as much as the moonshot of spontaneously building peace with a devoted enemy?
Nevertheless, let’s speak more on the idea of building empathy with an enemy. We talk about the power of empathy for making peace: The second thing we get wrong with how we discuss empathy is how seldom we talk about its power to wage war, to be the sword as well as the shield. Understanding what another person feels is not the same as submitting yourself to their emotional needs: You can truly and deeply understand a person’s need to murder you, know where it comes from and what underpins it, even feel sorry for the circumstances that brought them here, and that still doesn’t mean you’re just going to let them do it. It doesn’t mean that there’s a key phrase you can utter to change them, to reset those life experiences, to make them your friend. Empathy with another is not in direct opposition to violence, and that is an extremely important lesson – both because it may be necessary for you to wield both, and because as long as you don’t understand that others can wield both you are in danger.
An idea that has taken firm hold of the public imagination is that of psychopaths and sociopaths, people who have no empathy. Well, perhaps such people exist, but most often these seem to be diagnoses applied after the fact, built on the assumption that no one who has empathy could do the sorts of things these people have done. This is the part I don’t buy: If a person is inflicting torment for torment’s sake, this seems to me to be not an absence of empathy but an inversion of it – at least an inversion of the aforementioned naive understanding of empathy as inherently pacifistic. It’s not that strange an idea for a person to have empathy and either react in an unusual way to it – i.e. deriving pleasure from the suffering of others – or to simply ignore it in favor of other stronger emotions. The psychopath or sociopath may be a creature that exists, but it isn’t necessary for them to exist to explain behaviors like this. All that is just a long-winded way of saying: Empathy doesn’t always look the way we think it does, and that it is not innately peaceful.
Well, it’s incomplete, but what harm does this faulty conception of empathy as equivalent to peace actually cause? A great deal, perhaps. When we are trained to believe in the mere exercise of empathy as a step towards peace and plenty, what need is there to do anything at all? Can we not bear witness and feel sorrow for a tragedy and have done our duty? Can we not simply carry on our everyday lives, even as they generate new tragedies for tomorrow and each subsequent day? No… might it be even worse? Might we be training ourselves to cherish experiencing empathetic tragedy as an inherent moral good, incentivizing each inaction, each tragedy to be delivered to us? Why pay money to attempt to futilely prevent a tragedy when one can simply wait to see a million more, and by seeing them to see ourselves as saviors?
A manga/anime series I love partly for its ability to depict multiple aspects of empathy is Kaiji. The titular hero Kaiji participates in repeated deadly gambles and succeeds in large part because of his ability to see the best in everyone – both in his allies, who frequently let him down but who he still relies on to reach victory, and in his enemies, who his audacious plans rely on to be clever, competent, and ruthless. Kaiji exemplifies the ability to use empathy as a sword, one which can find its way to an enemy’s weakest point, and as a shield, one which finds and binds allies together. At one point, as he meets the main antagonist of the series, Hyoudou, face-to-face, in a hallway filled with the injured survivors of the previous game. Kaiji is aghast at Hyoudou’s relentless cruelty, and seeing this Hyoudou laughs and says (paraphrased): The secret of my success is to always have reminders, like this one, that I can do whatever I want, hurt as many people as I want, and their pain will not hurt me.
Empathy is not necessarily easy to disregard when it becomes inconvenient, but much of society is built on motivating that disregard.
Not only can empathy can be a weapon, we can train to use it more effectively as one. Though the concept of a criminal profiler is one that is vastly inflated in terms of real-world efficacy, this sort of weaponized empathy is core to that idea – though, of course, since feelings are considered girly it’s given a veneer of rational logicality. The idea of understanding, anticipating, and countering an opponent’s intent is one that occurs frequently in games: The term “yomi” (Japanese for “reading”) is used in the fighting game community to describe one’s ability to anticipate one’s opponent’s desire and intent. These sorts of head-games, predictions, and anticipation are vital to success in any conflict. We can also train in using empathy to build solidarity, friendship, allyship: We can talk to one another, and we can listen, and we can filter that understanding through an understanding of how our worldviews are all fucked up and misshapen through centuries of confusion and propaganda and myth.
If we can build this understanding, if we can hone these weapons, it may prove invaluable. The right-wing is becoming ever more frothing and delusional, and while this is terrifying and will cause tremendous harm it also means they’re hunting ghosts and demons instead of humans. If we are able to fight them as humans with human understanding, to understand what they will do and why, to control what they can see and when, then we can win. Those who dwell in reality, as painful and nonsensical as it is, who are able to stand on solid ground and see each other for what we are, have something that blind hate cannot touch.
Well, maybe this is all something I simply prefer to believe. So be it.