Opinion The Conservative Attack on Empathy - Jesus said some stuff about being nice. Now give all your money to poor people and open your borders.

Article|Archive

Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea. Instead of thinking and acting rationally, the theory goes, they’re moved to make emotional decisions that compromise their well-being and that of their home country. In this line of thought, empathetic approaches to politics favor liberal beliefs. An apparent opposition between thought and feeling has long vexed conservatives, leading the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro to famously declare that “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

But the current ascendancy of this anti-empathy worldview, now a regular topic in right-wing social-media posts, articles, and books, might be less a reasonable point of argumentation and more a sort of coping mechanism for conservatives confronted with the outcomes of certain Trump-administration policies—such as the nightmarish tale of a 4-year-old American child battling cancer being deported to Honduras without any medication, or a woman in ICE custody losing her mid-term pregnancy after being denied medical treatment for days. That a conservative presented with these cases might feel betrayed by their own treacherous empathy makes sense; this degree of human suffering certainly ought to prompt an empathetic response, welcome or not. Even so, it also stands to reason that rather than shifting their opinions when confronted with the realities of their party’s positions, some conservatives might instead decide that distressing emotions provoked by such cases must be a kind of mirage or trick. This is both absurd—things that make us feel bad typically do so because they are bad—and spiritually hazardous.

This is certainly true for Christians, whose faith generally counsels taking others’ suffering seriously. That’s why the New York Times best seller published late last year by the conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, is so troubling. In her treatise packaging right-wing anti-empathy ideas for Christians, Stuckey, a Fox News veteran who recently spoke at a conference hosted by the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, contends that left wingers often manipulate well-meaning believers into adopting sinful argumentative and political positions by exploiting their natural religious tendency to care for others. Charlie Kirk, the Republican activist who runs Turning Point USA, said that Stuckey has demolished “the No. 1 psychological trick of the left” with her observation that liberals wield empathy against conservatives “by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts” and then perverting them “to morally extort us into adopting their position.” Taken at face value, the idea that Christians are sometimes persuaded into un-Christian behavior by strong emotions is fair, and nothing new: Suspicion of human passions is ancient, and a great deal of Christian preaching deals with the subject of subduing them. But Toxic Empathy is not a sermon. It is a political pamphlet advising Christians on how to argue better in political debates—a primer on being better conservatives, not better Christians.

Empathy is an ambiguous concept. When it was imported into English from German a little more than a century ago, empathy referred to one’s capacity to merge experiences with objects in the world, a definition that current usage bears little resemblance to: The Atlantic reported in 2015 that “the social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts,” such as “knowing another’s thoughts and feelings,” “actually feeling as another does,” and “feeling distress at another’s suffering,” a kind of catchall term for having a moral imagination. Stuckey’s definition doesn’t distinguish among these different elements; she instead frames empathy itself as a specific emotion rather than a psychological capacity for understanding the emotions of others, which makes her usage especially confusing. Whatever it is, empathy isn’t something Stuckey wants to reject altogether: Jesus embodied a kind of empathy, and it can be, she says, “a powerful motivation to love those around you.”

The toxic kind of empathy, she contends, is the kind that makes you double-check your specifically conservative political priors. Some examples: “If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant” and “If you’re really a Christian, you’ll fight for social justice.” This argumentative technique, in which Christians are asked to consider their political positions in light of the logic of their own faith, can hardly be described as empathy in any common sense of the term. This linguistic confusion between rational arguments about whether a person’s political positions are adequately Christian, on one hand, and arguments that people should reason from emotion, on the other, runs through the entire debate about empathy. What Stuckey seems to be saying is merely that progressive assertions summon certain emotions inside their conservative debate partners—such as pity and compassion—that make them unwilling to defend their premises, regardless of whether said conservatives are actually inhabiting the emotional states of other people. Labeling those emotions as fruits of toxic empathy is a strategy for dealing with them: It resolves the tension between what one feels and what one thinks by dismissing one’s feelings as misguided. This approach glibly ignores the possibility that such emotions are in fact the voice of one’s conscience, and takes for granted that ignoring one’s sympathies for other people is a good Christian habit of mind.

In that sense, the toxic-empathy rhetorical framework, built for producing peace of mind for conservative debaters, threatens to render Christians insensitive to moral demands of Christianity that run contrary to conservative preferences. “Toxic empathy claims the only way to love racial minorities is to advance social justice,” Stuckey writes at one point, “but ‘justice’ that shows partiality to the poor or to those perceived as oppressed only leads to societal chaos.” It’s true that every person should be judged equally in the administration of the law, but it’s also the case that Christianity actually does dictate that the needs of the poor and powerless should be prioritized in society. Far from being a misleading interpretation adduced by bad-faith actors in political debates, it is rather the plain meaning of the Gospels, attested to by thousands of years’ worth of Christian saints and thinkers who have declared that God especially loves the poor and the oppressed. That fact remains as radical today as it was when Jesus was preaching, and now, just as then, there are people who can’t stand to recognize it.
 
Empathy is understanding, not necessarily pitying or sympathizing or opening your wallet for. You know how every study shows liberals don’t understand what conservatives believe but conservatives understand what liberals believe? That’s because of conservative empathy. They can put themselves in the mind of someone who is screaming that they are a Nazi and generally understand why they are thinking and feeling that, even though they aren’t right.

The end result of empathy and even sympathy is that people eventually need to learn to fish rather than wait for Jesus and his buddies to show up to give them the fish. Or to have them persuade the Roman tax collectors to go around forcing people to provide fish for others against their will.

Sometimes it means you don’t even bother teaching a man to fish because he has mugged the last three fishing teachers and you have other students who could be using that time.
 
It's this:

1.webp

With a bit of this:

2.webp
 
The people who scream "I'm an empath" the loudest tend to be the least empathetic people on the planet. Some are even outright anti-empathetic.
No, you're not an empath. This is an empath:
1751313549851.webp

She can read mental states from half a lightyear away, can you do that, Stephanie? Is that what the crystal collection is for?

If you claim to be an empath, you're claiming to have comic book super-powers, and I'm going to treat you like someone who makes those claims, by phoning the local asylum and reporting an escapee.
 
Empathy is understanding, not necessarily pitying or sympathizing or opening your wallet for.
There's always a big leap of illogic on the left to go from "I understand that a man spending life in prison will feel bad and hopeless the entire time" to "therefore, the right thing to do is not send him to prison"

The right is and has always been capable of going on to the next key part of the argument : "I understand a man spending life in prison will feel bad the entire time - but he should have considered that as his fate BEFORE he murdered someone for $5"

The left gets hung up on "The right thing to do is not make him feel bad" and stays there forever.
 
Last edited:
Here's the thing: Empathy isn't necessarily a mark of goodness.

Know who else has empathy? Cult leaders. It's why they're so successful at sucking people in.

I keep having to tell people over and over that having empathy doesn't mean you're a good person, or a better person than others, and especially if you're bragging and about it, and doubly especially if your empathy is selective of people who agree with you in the first place.

It's funny how these same people call for migrants and more empathy live in the most gated communities.
Welcome to the left: as long as they never have to give anything up for their own cause, their belief systems are entirely intact.
 
I keep having to tell people over and over that having empathy doesn't mean you're a good person, or a better person than others, and especially if you're bragging and about it, and doubly especially if your empathy is selective of people who agree with you in the first place.

I've had people scream at me in public for saying that empathy is not a virtue. That says enough on its own. Empathy is an in-born trait of all non-clinically-psychotic/sociopathic people, and is the sole mechanism responsible for the formation of social groups. The fact that "people" (Cluster-B AWFLs) are championing it as something more than the sum of its parts, means that they just learned about it sometime in late adolescence or adulthood, do NOT have it as an in-born mechanism, and had to conjure up some sort of simulation of empathy that they got really really excited about using and had to tell everyone because they think it's a psychic ability.

They gotta go, man.
 
She can read mental states from half a lightyear away, can you do that, Stephanie? Is that what the crystal collection is for?

If she was so great at reading mental states, why did she get assaulted so many times on the show.

Gene Roddenberry was a big believer in Psychoanalysis and he added her character to the show in part because of his vision of the future where everyone with an important job would be under the supervision of a mental health professional.
 
  • Feels
Reactions: ArnoldPalmer
The problem with manipulating people using their empathy is simple. Once they clock onto it they become resistant to it and eventually hostile to it. They become able to recognise the efforts even when minor and as such end up increasingly angry whenever it is attempted and even more likely to oppose it than most because they feel that in the past their good nature was abused and used.
 
The accusation that conservatives somehow lack empathy, an inborn trait in all human beings, is, ironically, just a way of dehumanizing conservatives; it demonstrates the performative lack of empathy so characteristics of modern libs, by which they excuse all their harassment, violence, etc.
 
This is why the nu-Left is so evil

They use your higher emotions, your desire to help your fellow man, to force you to basically destroy yourself. Self-immolation for other. It's pretty much Ann Rand's whole schitck.

"If you really loved these people you'd let them into your country". It's no different then the "if you loved these people you'd donate most of your money" or "if you really loved these people you'd give them your life"

It's always the same direct power ploy. And you just know the people saying it do not believe it the least. It's a blatant power grab and sadly most people fall for it because they're afraid to be labelled a "bad person".

Fuck you asshole I am a bad person. I put my family and friends first and fuck you and your sob stories.
 
Christian charity is not a suicide pact. Jesus Himself said "it is not right to take food from the children and give it to dogs".
Holy shit, I cannot believe you fucked up the understanding of that passage this bad. This is genuinely infuriating. How can you fuck up this bad? Your statement is in reference to the Canaanite woman, and Jesus' followers trying to convince Him to not help non-Jews. The story ends with Jesus praising her faith and healing her daughter. After he says the line about dogs, she acknowledges the metaphor, and points out that even dogs are allowed scraps from the master's table, to which Christ replies with "Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted."

If you genuinely believe the horse shit you just spouted and claim Christianity, you ought not to, because by definition you are claiming that Christ came only for the Jews.

I don't even disagree with the idea that empathy has been weaponized against conservatives, but I am absolutely appalled that you would intentionally twist His words like that. My God.
 
please tell them telepathy is real next. I want them to present evidence in a formal setting using “the defendants own thoughts”
 
Empathy is the ability to imagine the emotions and thinking of other people.
It's not a virtue, it's a skill. Something you lack. Sympathy might be the word you are looking for and you lack that too.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: ArnoldPalmer
Back