It’s everyone’s duty to have empathy. It is part of what makes us human. Even lower animals have empathy. But perhaps you just don’t understand what empathy is. Empathy is not pity nor charity nor any of the other concepts that it is often confused with. Empathy is simply the ability to put one’s self in the imagined situation of another and to see the world from another’s point of view. To deny, disavow, or assuage empathy is psychopathy. It’s not healthy for an individual nor for a society. In fact it is the opposite of society, of socialization.
Just because our problems don’t have easy answers doesn’t mean we should despair or be lead by fear or by those who would use despair and fear to manipulate the masses to gain power. That tendency is the core problem. The more desperate and frustrated people become at “the system” the more easy they become to being manipulated into tearing it down by anyone. Even when it is that very system that supports and protects them the most from the poverty crime and exploitation.
This is the reason why the most rural states, the most conservative leaning states simultaneously bemoan federal government spending while at the same time being the largest recipients of it. The desperation in some of these states is so deep that many people are willing to believe anything even if it is in the end harmful to their own self interest.
Society isn’t a bunch of people throwing up their hands and saying “oh fuck it we are all screwed” or “well you have the wrong, job/religion/home/gender/etc. therefore you lose” That’s just disfunction society can’t work that way. So the question then becomes who benefits from that kind of rhetoric? Who spreads that rhetoric? Not, who are you hearing that from trying to say someone else is saying it but who are the ones actually spreading it.
When we start losing empathy, we start to lose the ability to humanize others. That path of dehumanization only leads one place and it’s a dark place. Russia, North Korea are there now. Germany and Europe have been there in the past as well as countless other nations across the globe. And there is a common theme for all those place and all those times in history. They are characterized by dehumanizing dictatorships that discard the rule of law lead by strong populists that decry democracy and pluralism.
There is only one group of people trying to drag us into that place right now. There is only one candidate that admires and fauns over those very same dictators while espousing the very same kind of rhetoric.
