I used to think that empathy was a result of actually feeling what another is feeling. Allowing your mirror neurons to fire and have that connection to the other person. Their pain is your pain and that sort of thing. But this is only effective if your mind can comprehend that individual as being similar to yourself. Almost a duplicate of yourself outside your body. That connection is key and quite often you won’t feel that for everyone.
In the classic stories for kids they depict good vs evil, bad vs good and we often carry this mentality into our everyday lives. Is this person good for me and the people I care about or are they out to do some harm? This mentality can be okay for individual actions after looking at the reason why they feel they have to do what they have to do. However, those actions are not the people themselves and most likely a symptom of some greater problem within that individual. You can give these problems many names, narcissist, psychopath, sociopath and all sorts of other terms the media have used over the years to describe people who are mean’t to be the bad guys.
Truth is, no matter who we are, we are all wanting to be part of something big. Often delusions get in the way to make us think that we can be at the top of this great thing. But none of us are, really. You could be the king of England just after the dark ages and still feel the threat of being overthrown or killed. There are people that you still need to keep happy, nobels that keep you in your position of power and offer your will on a local level. It’s never complete power over people and whenever people in charge do have this mentality, the company, country or whatever, slips very quickly into a bad state of being dramatically decreasing the likelihood of them surviving.
One person doesn’t have all the power to be able to make the right decision for all. It would be exhausting and impossible to expect an individual to know everything and be able to make the correct decisions everytime. Decision fatigue would soon set in so quickly and terrible decisions will be made every time.
I say this because it often comes back to this idea of good vs bad. You see, this idea in itself is narcissistic. Life is not black and white. Life is about choices and reasons why those choices are made. I’ve known this for a while but still kept on clinging to this idea of protecting the people that are closest to me or a project I have been directly involved in. Protecting them from people who I consider problematic due to the way these people have harmed the people or projects in the past. Thinking that if they break my trust, they will struggle to get it back.
But then, this is confusing, because not everyone knows that something will do damage to something else. Or perhaps I am in an illusion that the thing that was done will harm the things I love. Sometimes it has been a minor dent to my ego and then I turn and face this “threat” head on. My mirror neurons firing up for the people and things that are closest to me but not for my perceived “enemy”.
For how can I empathise with someone so different from my way of thinking? Thing is, is that you don’t empathise as long as you don’t understand. It’s easy and takes a lot less energy to turn around and point fingers when not truly understanding the why. Or, perhaps, like in my case, you fully understand the why but you don’t consider it justification for the actions. But perhaps the other person doesn’t know any other way. Perhaps they themselves are afraid that they, or the people closest to them, will get hurt. So they are responding in the exact way that you are to a percieved threat. Decreasing empathy dramatically on their part.
You see, I used to think empathy was down to mirror neurons and I could trust them to give me guidance. If I don’t feel something for someone, then they are not worth knowing. But I now know that empathy is also a choice. It is a way of being able to step into someone elses shoes and being able to understand things from their perspective. Whether you be suffering with antisocial personality disorder lacking the activation of those mirror neurons or just seeing someone as so different from yourself that you can’t empathise with them. You still have the capability to empathise. We have the ability to stop seeing the world as black and white, as this person is bad and this person is good. To be able to see the reality that everyone deserves empathy no matter what they do.
I’m not saying that we should go around loving criminals locked up. However, instead of thinking that these criminals deserve to be in the cells they end up in, perhaps we should consider that they are in those cells to protect society from their twisted view on the world. Perhaps they need help to see that their actions caused great harm both to society and themselves. They need help to be shown an alternative. That their narrative can be different with others assisting them who have a shared vision. That people are not merely just pawns on a chess board, but also people who can offer good advice, who can carry out seperate wills and create great things. We all need to realise that the person we perhaps hate so much, could perhaps offer us our greatest lesson. We need to offer the greatest empathy, forgiveness and love for even those people who will want to do us harm. That includes ourselves.
For you see, if we don’t, we will always loose whatever games we have crafted for percieved survival. I know many from a poorer background, perhaps orphans and many others will fight me on this because they have fought for scraps. But I say to you all, it is always better to gain a friend then to gain an enemy. We are all stronger together, no matter our backgrounds. So lets look after each other, even through bad times where it seems many are against you.