(June 12, 2025 at 10:02 am)Paleophyte Wrote:(June 12, 2025 at 8:24 am)Belacqua Wrote: This sounds like a good idea to me. But in practice, I'm afraid, it appears to be extremely difficult to stick to.
We all think empathy is great. Then we all see that it's about the easiest thing in the world to switch off. Once it is discovered that someone falls outside the range of the locally acceptable ideology, then that person will almost certainly stop receiving empathy.
For example, if you were to start a thread on this forum expressing the opinion that Donald Trump is good for the country, or that trans women aren't really women, you would not find that people respond by making you feel understood. No one will say, "I get where you're coming from, but [sympathetically expressed attempt to persuade]."
I suspect people will argue that such opinions are so far out of the realm of acceptability that no empathy should be given to the person who holds them. Which means that empathy fails to cover a very wide range of disagreement.
I don't see why it's particularly surprising to you. Empathy is an evolved behavior in a social species, and as such it doesn't tend to cover the out-group much. I'm willing to bet that if I showed up at your church and started expounding on the differences between Darwinian Evolution and Punctuated Equilibrium that I'd get the cold shoulder. Empathy has its limits and if you go beyond social norms you get less of it.
That hasn't been my experience. I'm an absolute miscreant in real life and people still treat me fairly.
"Imagination, life is your creation"
