A Yale professor released this video as a teaser for his new book about empathy. The main thesis is that empathy -- our urge to help our fellow human beings because we put ourselves in their shoes and want to ease their burden -- is a morally bad thing that makes the world worse.
http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/474588/why-empathy-is-a-bad-thing/
For example, if you have $100 to donate to charity
- donating $1 each to a hundred different organizations makes you feel good a hundred times. Mathematically speaking,
Feel Good x 100 = Feel Amazing! However, that $1 costs more to process than it's worth, so the charity itself might actually lose money as a result of your generosity.
- donating $100 to a single organization only makes you feel good once. If you're keeping track, that's a whole lot less warm glow for your money, as
Feel Good x 1 = Feel Good. However, the recipient charity gets a useful amount from your donation, so it's a much better allocation of your cash even though it doesn't necessarily feel that way to you.
In his other examples, our empathy tends to get directed toward specific individuals more than toward larger more abstract causes.
- "We care more about a single baby stuck in a well than we do about global warming."
- Governments use specific examples of suffering victims to motivate their country to go to war, but then the war causes orders of magnitude more suffering than the problems that incited it.
Is he right?
Does caring about other people and trying to help them really make the world worse?
Personally, I think he's deliberately graying the line between (A) empathy, versus (B) selfish motives disguised as empathy, and (C) empathetic people who get channeled unwittingly into being the engine behind a non-empathetic action.
True, empathy makes us vulnerable. There are plenty of times when I feel someone's pain and
really wish I didn't feel it.
True, for some people the reason for helping others isn't that it relieves human suffering but rather that it feels so dang good to brag about it later. (I'm talking about you, International Volunteer who mainly did the trip in order to get selfies with orphans to post on Facebook.)
True, one person's authentic urge to help can get harnessed by another person's calculated desire for power. (I'm talking about you, Activist Protester who's sincerely in it to help the poor union workers in the American Rust Belt, but ultimately just ends up as part of a faceless mass of voters trying to bring someone like Donald Trump to power, when Trump himself is probably one of the last people on earth who'd actually care what it's like to be poor or what life is like in a blue collar job.)
But despite all of that, real empathy is a moral must-have for a society. In and of itself, it cannot possibly make the world worse. The alternative is insensitivity, intolerance, or even sociopathy.
What if we stopped wanting to comfort a crying baby?
What if we felt nothing at all in the face of 300,000 displaced Syrian refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean as their last desperate effort for survival?
What if everyone just kept walking when an old woman stumbled and fell into the street while trying to step down off the city bus?
What if it didn't matter when your brother, son, father, or friend got diagnosed with terminal cancer?
True, we could be more thoughtful about the causes that we apply our altruism toward, and we should critically evaluate our real motives, but it would likely be the death of humanity as we know it if we stopped feeling the urge to help others altogether.
