4 ms·
Lack of compassion/empathy is a much bigger problem than we can imagine, I realize it more and more as I grow older. If we pause for a minute and watch the wor
by justaguyhere 8y ago
Lack of compassion/empathy is a much bigger problem than we can imagine, I realize it more and more as I grow older.
If we pause for a minute and watch the words and actions of people around us (or even our own) intentionally, we can see how little empathy a lot of us have.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoAs I've grown older, I've come to this conclusion. It is a moral imperative to be compassionate and have empathy, to be prepared and not surprised whatsoever when those you interact with have neither, and have enough strength and resources (physically, emotionally, financially, politically) when those without are harming others and you must intervene. You should love your fellow human, but be prepared to punch a bully in the face.
- UnFleshedOne 8y agoEmpathy is a fairly limiting mechanism actually, it doesn't scale at all -- as they say "one death is a tragedy, million deaths is a statistic", that's how empathy works. Empathy makes people feel bad for 1 person not making ends meet because of delayed payments, but they don't feel 800k more bad because 800k people are in that situation. Using feelings to arrive at conclusions at those scales simply doesn't work. There were studies where people felt less urge (willing to spend less on charity for example) to help 100 people out of 10000 than to help 10 people out of 20. We should have less empathy and more reasoned compassion and we should try to consciously scale it appropriately.