“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.”

– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

When writing, there are often other ideas that come up at the same time. Oftentimes these other ideas are forgotten, but sometimes they appear subdued and subconsciously in a work of writing. Maybe it’s an admiration of someone, or maybe disapproval of something. For example, I have mentioned a number of things related to my distaste of capitalism, liberalism, and democracy, yet I haven’t yet gotten to writing anything substantial about any of them. Another example is empathy, namely the sin of empathy. I’ve alluded to it a few times, and finally actually mentioned it a few posts back. Given popular demand, I want to finally lay out what the sin of empathy is, why it’s a problem, and where to go from there.

Before really diving in, it is important to note that sympathy and empathy are two different ideas. Not completely different, they are both related, but not quite the same. Sympathy is generally defined as feeling for somebody and empathy is feeling with somebody. Sympathy was a term that came into popular use in the sixteenth century, whereas empathy is a newer term. Empathy started to be used more and more in the twentieth century and is thereby a much more recent concept.

In a vacuum, both have their place and are not inherently bad. Sympathy emerged as a way to share in someone’s emotions and to feel what they are feeling. It is still used in many languages and is generally seen as a good thing. The idea with empathy is to try and take the initial idea of feeling with someone, and taking it further. With empathy, one should actually try and put themselves in the shoes of someone else. If a friend is feeling depressed, you should not only feel bad for them, but you should feel bad with them. You should try and imagine why they are feeling that way and how you would feel if you were in the same position. It seems to me that empathy is the way in which people can try to harmonize with others and try to really feel what others are experiencing. Credit where credit is due, this is a very interesting psychological evolution and one that makes sense, it seems like the correct next step.

However, there is one flaw with empathy that sympathy does not have. When one is trying to sympathize with someone else, it does not really matter why the other person is sad or why they are feeling what they are feeling. This may not deepen understanding and is maybe a tad impersonal, but it means that any sympathy can be given freely and without judgment. If a friend is feeling down, I don’t need to know or care why, all that matters is that you feel bad for them and that you are there to help and support them, no matter the underlying reasons. Empathy’s goal is that one should be able to empathize with the other person, you should be able to feel with and feel why they are feeling whatever it is they are feeling. There is a baseline assumption that many overlook. Can we really be so sure that we can effectively put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and really truly understand why they are feeling what they are feeling? Put simply, how can you know what’s in the heart of someone else?

This issue often doesn’t actually matter. If someone just bought a new car and they feel happy afterwards, that is easy enough to empathize with them and to ascertain that it is probably the new car that is making them happy. When we have an emotion to empathize with, using reasonable deduction, it’s easy enough to make a guess as to what caused this emotion. Though, as said, we can never really be totally sure if we are empathizing correctly. If the emotions and the person are more complex, then it may be more difficult to put yourself in their shoes. If we are starting with an emotion, working backwards is possible, but what about if it’s not an emotion that we are starting with? What if we start with an action and have to empathize with the emotion behind it?

For example, let’s say that a teenager steals a bag of chips from a gas station. Instead of immediate judgement or condemnation, empathy says that we should ask why did he do this? Why did he steal? What is his family life like? Maybe he was hungry? We should try and imagine what we would do if we were in his situation. I would argue that trying to empathize with his actions and not his emotions is already a move too far, but we’ll continue for the sake of this exercise. To empathize, we might imagine what life is like for him everyday. We then imagine ourselves as a teenager in a broken home. We imagine ourselves hungry and just wanting to eat. We can then see how we, as a teenager, would bring ourselves to steal the bag of chips. Seems reasonable enough, but how do we know that we are truly feeling the same things as him? How do we know that what we would do as a teenager are what he would do as a teenager? We don’t. We can’t ever really know if two people are sharing the exact same emotion for the same reason. In effect, this could mean that we believe he stole because he was hungry, when he might have stolen because he didn’t want to use any of his allowance. Empathy has no guardrails against this. We can tell the teenager that we empathize with him and his situation, even when we are imagining and feeling completely different emotions in our head.

There are more examples that can be had. Let’s say a pregnant woman crosses the border illegally, a man kills a police officer during a traffic stop, or someone stabs another person to death on a train. In each of these examples, we might feel like the right thing to do is to try and empathize with the perpetrator. Because even though they might have done something wrong, they are still people, and their experiences and emotions should be respected all the same. Let’s look at the first example as a test. Why do you think the pregnant woman crossed the border illegally? The first step that many take is asking themselves, why would I cross the border illegally? However, we have already created a massive problem. You were not the one who crossed the border illegally, she crossed the border illegally. So you may come up with any number of reasons why you would do what she did, but in the end this is meaningless, because you didn’t take that action, she did. Feeling bad for her and her situation is fair, but it can be dangerous to impose reasons and emotions on her situation that are completely false.

The biggest flaw with empathy is that we ask ourselves what we would do or feel in the other person’s situation, but we are not the other person. They are not us. Others have motives and reasons that we often would never have considered. We may feel for them and sympathize with their position, but empathizing can lead us to concoct wild stories and defenses in our head. Until now, the impacts of empathy aren’t necessarily sinful or problematic, but when applied at scale, this is when the problem starts to take shape.

Democracy is not my favorite form of government, I think there are some inherent flaws with it that most people ignore. A full dissertation will come one day, but for now I need to explain how one of its flaws can cause irreversible damage when combined with empathy. One of the issues with democracy, at least universal suffrage, is that only popularity matters. Feasibility and practically are not important. As long as fifty-one percent vote to take everything from the forty-nine percent, it is allowed to happen. This means that rational decisions are not always made. It is my view that there has been a feminization of society since the end of the Second World War (worth its own deep-dive). Values more associated with the feminine have become the most important values in the current year. Whereas once strength, influence, and justice may have once been our society’s most important values, now we care primarily about tolerance, equality, and social-justice. In this vein, I think empathy is being used way too much and way too frequently. In particular, judgement has become an absolute no-go.

Empathy has become a value in its own right, and more than exercising justice and righteousness, we now have to understand why a criminal did what they did. Let’s look again at our examples, a pregnant woman crosses the border illegally, a man kills a police officer during a traffic stop, and someone stabs another person to death on a train. It has become taboo to say that these people should all be arrested and face punishment, that’s unfair and doesn’t take into account their lived experience. Maybe the police officer was being racist, or maybe the killer on the train needed psychological help and shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions. In a more masculine and patriarchal society, we would have said tough luck. Actions have consequences and while you might have a sob story, justice still needs to prevail. But because of the feminization of society and because of the power that has been given to overly emotional women and effeminate men, justice is no longer the priority. It is much more important for someone’s story to be heard and for someone to feel listened to. Empathy comes before justice and often justice gets thrown out if a good enough story can be dreamed up.

In the end, this leads to situations where an evil person does something evil, but some person in authority tries to empathize with the perpetrator and comes up with some sob story based on what they would do, completely unrelated to why the perpetrator committed the crime. Then, when this person should be brought to justice, the person is authority ties themselves up with the perpetrator emotionally and decides that it would be unfair to sentence the perpetrator to anything harsh, because the person is authority would only do that evil thing if they had x, y, z reasons to. In this instance empathy is being used to give a motive to someone that does not exist and often could not exist. Unless we are God, it is impossible to know the hearts of others and yet many people foolishly believe that they can actually know why someone did what they did.

“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” – Adam Smith

At scale, this is how civilization dies. Crime doesn’t get punished because well, I would only do crime if I was living in poverty. Mass migration and the great replacement is allowed to continue because well, I would only migrate somewhere if I was fearing for my life. Drug abuse and dysfunction is encouraged because well, I would only do drugs if I had a hard childhood. The truth is, we are being way too empathic with evil people who do evil things. Sometimes people do evil just because and there isn’t a deeper reason worth investigating. This is ignoring the fact that it should probably be irrelevant anyways. It doesn’t matter if you have a reason for stealing a bag of chips or if you are just evil, you should be punished regardless.

This is what I regard as the sin of empathy, namely excusing the evil behavior of others because one believes that they would only engage in a particular behavior if one had a good reason to. Modern empathy often ignores the truth and is unrealistic in how it empathizes with others. It is naive and quite presumptive to assume that everyone across the globe acts and feels the same way. Some people do things for incomprehensible reasons, and that’s just the way it is, we don’t have to try and empathize with everything. I think this problem with empathy is a pretty major one, but there is a solution. Personally, I think we could just leave empathy in the twentieth century and with elementary school social workers and get back to sympathizing with people. But, if we really wanted to use empathy correctly, there is a simple solution. Rather than asking yourself; what would I do in that situation, how would I feel? Ask yourself; why did they do that and how do they feel? How can I feel what they are feeling? Feeling with someone is fine, let’s just not assume that we know exactly how or why they are feeling that way.

“It is joy to the just to do judgment: but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity.” – Proverbs 21:15 (KJV)

“Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” – Isaiah 1:17 (KJV)