Nine Empathies

From Chapter 8: Empathy for the monster.

I can give you a very simple formula for the empathy for the monster: Take your pre-existing dysempathy for the untouchable - your niggardly refusal to attribute human emotions to him - and combine it with a big fat dollop of the empathy for the impossible.

Bingo Instant monster. You already don't want to believe the untouchable is truly a human being, so refusing to believe in his human motivations while imbuing him with colossally amazing impossible characteristics makes for a thing you can slaver and slobber over in your every living nightmare.

So we fear terrorists and drug cartels and carjacking tweakers and teenage gang-bangers and steely-eyed state troopers with itchy trigger fingers. Not to deprive you of your entertainment, as the mass media sells and resells you your own misery, but the disaster that is most likely to befall you is the failure of your marriage - caused, I know without much doubt - by your failure to put first things first, as evidenced by this disproportionate empathy for the monster.

Here's another formula, the one proposed by determinist/reductionist scientists: Take a fully-human human being and, by recourse to an empathy for the impossible, subtract his empathy. This is not actually what they say. They claim that human beings can exist without empathy. That would mean that a human being - a thing that only comes into its fully-realized existence as the result of a five-year-long accelerating process of extreme empathy - shuns the very thing that got him to fully-conscious human awareness as soon as he gets there.

Does that sound right to you?

"But, but, but... But what about sociopaths? What about narcissists? What about malignant narcissists - monsters made with super-powered empathy for the impossible. How can you say they have empathy when they're all so mean?"

How was it that the bully on the schoolyard had so much empathy for you, when he was taunting you so cruelly?

Because moral philosophy is inverted, everything else is, too. Moral behavior is self-adoring, not self-sacrificial. Immoral behavior is self-destructive - not 'cool.' The mysterious monsters of the academy's pantheon of evil are not without empathy. They have more of it than anyone. Empathy is how they survive in a world they have misidentified as being relentlessly hostile to them. The interior mental states of the people around them are the hand-holds they use to navigate the seemingly infinite gauntlet that is reality to a human mind this enduringly damaged.

Do you have empathy for the person, for the opposite, for the untouchable? This is all that the monsters of science really are, horribly abused children whose only survival strategy, even more horribly, is to replicate the abuse by abusing you.

But what makes it abuse is the outrage - the victim's particular and excruciating emotional pain - and what makes the outrage outrageous is the empathy - the empathy the bully had to possess in order to wound you with such perfectly-honed, perfectly-aimed, perfectly-timed outrages. It cannot be the case that a human being expresses the inability to experience empathy with a torrential fusillade of malicious empathy.

Here is one more way of thinking about empathy for the monster, and this one has the inestimable benefit of real monsters...

...but you'll have to read the book to find out how real monsters are made...