Lacking Empathy Isn't Terrible

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I remember 10 years ago when I was The Face of WP. Now I'm an old relic.

LOL...you better watch out!

AuntBlabby is gaining on you!

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I think the worst thing about this "lacking empathy" thing is the risk of getting a bad reputation thanks to stuff such as Baron-Cohen's "Science Of Evil." It was some construct in which pillars of society such as himself have "positive empathy," sociopaths have "negative empathy," and we have "zero empathy." There's a kind of logic to it, but there are a lot of idiots out there who might take it as meaning that we're halfway towards being sociopaths. As we're living in a world where most things like that get cancelled in case idiots see it as a cue to marginalise a minority, it seems strange to me that he got away with it.

But among people who think more clearly, I don't see anything terrible about this "lack of empathy." Naturally it's not great if we have trouble divining how other people feel, but if they really want us to know then they can always tell us. It's not rocket science. And with a little experience we can figure out a lot about people's feelings even if we can't easily get it intuitively.

I sometimes get a kind of empathic insight that is hard to put into words and can take time to percolate. It almost feels like magic at the time, as if for me at the time I'm doing something astonishingly advanced. I suspect it's some partly-functional bit of NT brain wiring that occasionally fires up, but I really don't know.

I worked a lot with autistic kids and teens and being autistic myself I would not describe autistics as lacking empathy the rare instances where I would claim someone had an empathy problem tended to have some sort of psychopathy.

Autism is a communication disorder, not an emotional one, being unable to comprehend what someone is feeling due to a communication problem is very different then not being able to process someones emotions after a situation has been properly understood.

For a better understanding of what I am describing I would google the "double empathy problem".

All in all I would argue that empathy is an advantage as having more knowledge for a given situation has always been advantageous for me I will never purposefully withhold information from myself.

It is not correct to say autistics have zero empathy. I hate it when people say that.

Tonight I felt in a rotten mood because of my depression (I felt irritable and agitated). Then I heard unusual banging and slamming coming from one of the other apartments, and that got me angry. Then it stopped, but started back up again. So I went outside to see what was going on. But what I did see automatically changed my mood completely, from angry to overly concerned and sympathetic. There was a young woman crying her eyes out outside one of the other doors. I assume she had been arguing with her boyfriend and he had kicked her out. She wasn't drunk or anything. She was crying so much, and was shaking like she was frightened, and she couldn't speak because she was crying too much. I went over to her and put my hand on her shoulder, and spoke to her nicely asking her what was wrong and if I could help. I didn't care any more about the banging. I wasn't angry any more. I was concerned for this girl. I had to hold back tears because her crying made me want to cry. All I wanted to do was cuddle her and do whatever I could to help her, even take her into my apartment so that she was safe and could sort out whatever problem she was having. But she just apologised and then ran to her car and drove away. Now I'm crying myself. I am so scared she'll commit suicide or something. She was a total stranger to me but I felt so strongly for her. I don't know where she drove off to. I hope she went to a relative's or something. I hope she doesn't take her own life.

You might say this was sympathy and compassion, but if I lacked empathy I probably would have yelled at her for making all the noise despite her being extremely upset. But my emotions changed without me controlling them. Seeing a person crying affected me a great deal and my instinct was to console her. It's my nature. Now I can't stop thinking about her. I hope to God she's all right.

For me empathy is conditional. For example, I saw a video of a man setting a flag on fire the other day and it quickly spread out of control and he ended up on fire before running out of shot. I laughed out loud. If it had been an innocent passer by who caught fire, I'd feel terrible for them and hope their injuries would not have any impact on their life, but in this case, I really don't care what happened to this person.

The only lacking empathy we have - is the understanding part.

Plus most of us have empathy for animals, don’t we?

Care to elaborate?

If someone were to explain what they are going through, then don’t most of us feel bad for them and understand?

Yes (as I see it here a lot) but you said that's the part we lack.

Well it's not easy to have a discussion about the topic because it seems people have different definitions of "empathy." This is what dictionary.com says:

Feeling other people's emotions is what I was thinking of. That can actually be a negative thing if you start feeling other people's unpleasant emotions. Considering all the miserable people in the world, I'm glad I don't have much of that kind of empathy.

As for "the psychological identification" with other people...well if autistic people have atypical neurology, it seems normal for autistic people to have difficulty empathizing with certain emotions or certain people. It's not easy to identify with a foreign psychological experience.

Also, if you are identifying with another person, that implies that your own experience is connected to that person's experience. So you would not want to harm that person (because you'd experience the harm as well). So I don't agree that empathy can be used to harm people; I don't agree that empathy means simply "knowing what other people are experiencing." It's more than that, a deeper connection.

Honestly, I'm sure that some people just assume lack of empathy because autistic people don't show typical signs of empathy. Normies even assume you're not listening just because you aren't looking at them. They try to read autistic people like they read non-autistic people, and it doesn't always work because autistic people have different body language and sometimes use no body language at all.

So I don't expect them to know what they are talking about, and that's another reason why I don't take the lack of empathy thing seriously.

Last edited by starkid on 01 Aug 2021, 9:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Why would you care less for the first person? And what does "running out of shot" mean?

Out of shot means the person leaves the frame, they're not on screen anymore.

Good point.