You destroy anything when you withdraw empathy from it. When you don’t care about anything you are on the path to destroying it. You destroy a country when there is no empathy for its institutions or cultures. When you withdraw empathy from a countries values and principles you can find it easy to destroy them. You destroy people when you don’t have any empathy for them. When you withdraw empathy from anyone or anybody it is easy to destroy them.
It has ever been the same formula throughout history. From the Ancient World to the Medieval World to the Industrial World and now to the Information World, destroy empathy for the things and people you hate and then you can destroy them.
What is empathy you ask? How is empathy different from sympathy and compassion and mercy? I won’t bore you with any dictionary definitions or twist your brain with some pure academic definitions. Here are my thoughts on what empathy is:
Empathy puts you in the other person’s shoes, heart, soul and mind. When you have true empathy for someone you stand inside them not beside them. Mercy, compassion and sympathy leave you outside the person. I feel sorry for you. I feel bad for you. I will give you something to make you feel better or to help you out. However, I do not feel the pain that you do when I simply have sympathy for you. My friend Jaine says that empathy is essential for mercy and compassion. I think she is right, but we must start with empathy. Without empathy, we are merely kind and thoughtful. We have empathy for one another when we become one with the other. Their heartache is our heartache. Their suffering is our suffering.
The other day while waiting for my wife to finish her Senior Fit class at the Casa Grande Community Center, I picked up the local newspaper. The Casa Grande Dispatch had an article about a new bill being proposed by the Republicans in the Arizona Senate. The bill SB-1268 would require hospitals to inquire whether or not the patient was here legally before providing healthcare treatment. Many empathetic people are concerned that it would deter people who needed treatment from getting it. The bill’s sponsor said that she does not care. “They should stay in their own countries if they want to have care”, said Wendy Rogers during a hearing on her legislation. What do you think Ms. Rogers would say if this was her mother or father or sister or brother? What if it was a friend or relative of yours? What would you say? Is Ms. Rogers one heart short of empathy? Do you think she ever read the inscription inside the Statue of Liberty? One stanza of the inscription therein states the following:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Why don’t we just knock down this wretched statue? It would appear that its message is no longer accepted or believed in by millions of Americans. I am sure Elon Musk would approve of its destruction. He could use Ellis Island as a new departure point for his Mars expedition. After all, here is what Musk had to say about empathy:
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
This lack of empathy seems to be a major theme running throughout the Republican Party.
I asked my wife’s pastor one day why he thought that so many conservative Christians wanted to post the Ten Commandments of Moses from the Old Testament in city halls all over the country, but I had never heard of one effort to post the Eight Beatitudes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount any place. Would not Christians be more expected to support the words of Jesus than the words of Moses? His comment was that many conservative Christians felt the words of Jesus were kind of wimpy. Interesting that Jesus’s empathy for humanity is regarded as wimpy.
It had not been 12 hours since the new pope was elected before the so-called Christian Right was attacking him. Following in the footsteps of his predecessor Pope Francis, the new Pope Leo XIV would seem to be a human who had empathy for the poor and hungry and dispossessed.
Transcript: MAGA Fury Boils Over at New Pope’s “Anti-Trump” Views
“Leo is known to share some of the same priorities as Francis, particularly when it comes to the environment and outreach to migrants and the poor, according to The College of Cardinals Report, a resource created by a team of Vatican journalists.” Google AI
Read closely and you will see why Pope Leo XIV is anathema to Trump and his supporters.
- He would protect the environment
- He would protect immigrants
- He would protect the poor
Imagine a Christian who would dare have empathy for these people and the world.
Now if I seem biased and oblivious to the limitations of empathy, let me point out that throughout history, there have been many great leaders who have had little or no empathy for humanity. Some of the most notable people and notable categories are:
- Attila the Hun
- Genghis Khan
- Mussolini
- Stalin
- Hitler
- Most slave owners
- Climate change deniers
- Greedy billionaires
It certainly seems like you can go far in this world by substituting cruelty and greed for empathy and compassion. I will end this blog with the following thoughts on empathy:
“Our bodies have five senses: touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing. But not to be overlooked are the senses of our souls: intuition, peace, foresight, trust, empathy. The differences between people lie in their use of these senses; most people don’t know anything about the inner senses while a few people rely on them just as they rely on their physical senses, and in fact probably even more.” ― C. JoyBell C.
“Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled.” ― Anthon St. Maarten
“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” ― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
“Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection – or compassionate action.” ― Daniel Golema
This Link leads to a thread on Facebook with some interesting quotes and comments on empathy in America today: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1125366842958078
Some Recent News Reports Showing a Complete Lack of Empathy for Humanity. If you have any please share in my comments and I will post as an addendum to this blog.
“DOGE Is Bringing Back a Deadly Disease”
Silicosis is typically caused by years of breathing in silica dust at work, and can worsen even after work exposures stop. In recent years, after decades of inaction, the federal government finally took several important steps to reduce the incidence of this ancient and debilitating disease. Under the Trump administration, all that progress is going away, in but one example of the widespread destruction now taking place across the federal government. —- The Atlantic,
Tennessee’s GOP leads the fight to deny public education to children without documents
The sponsors of the proposal have largely downplayed denying children the right to education, but instead have focused on the fiscal impact states are facing in educating children residing in the U.S. illegally. —– US News, AP
Aging Capriciously 