Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Empathy

Acknowledging the Human In Each Other

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On April 15, 2026

20 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time around doctors and nurses and low level bureaucrats.

Way too much time.

I’ve learned a couple things as a result, however.

  • You get the best care from doctors or service from anyone else when they feel you as a human.
  • The best way to get them to feel you as human, is to feel, and act, as if they are human.

Ian’s rule of doctors is as follows: all the best doctors really care about their patients and are upset when their patients die or are hurting.

Obviously my experience is not “study wide” but it’s far more than most people and I have literally never had a good doctor who didn’t attach to me on a human level.

Now some people are just like this: they treat everyone as another human. When you do so, there’s a queer acknowledgement that the other person is like you: they have feelings, thoughts. They hurt sometimes. They matter.

But most people don’t, because that acknowledgment of others as human means you open yourself to care, and when you care you can be hurt thru the other person. (You can also, and people forget this, experience great joy and happiness thru other people. One of the four Buddhist emotions which are trained is “happiness for other people’ being happy.” After all, no matter how shit your life is there’s always someone whose life is going great.)

Jobs where you see tons of people in trouble going by, there is a temptation to shut down. To treat them as objects and simply do your job by the book. It’s self protection. But, again, in my experience, for whatever reason, if the care isn’t there, in most jobs where the real tasks is helping people, if you don’t care, you don’t do a good job. It shouldn’t be that way, maybe. If you do all the right things without giving a damn, it should be the same, right?

But it isn’t.

There’s a tactical level here. I made a connection with one doctor who injured himself by asking about it and following up. Of course, if I hadn’t actually cared that he was in pain, just asking would have meant nothing. In another case I had a doctor spill out his problems with his daughter. He was a good guy, and had always been a good doctor, but after that he took extra care of me.

But the tactical level isn’t important, it’s an outgrowth of the correct attitude. We’ve all met people who we know care about us the second we meet them. Some of them are the true Saints of the world: those who genuinely care for everyone. Others, we just made an instant connection.

But it’s this care that matters most. If you care about others, most of them (there are always exceptions) will be aware of it, even if only subconsciously, and they will reciprocate, again, often without even realizing they’re doing so.

Of course the best way to do this is to just care about everyone, at least somewhat. If I’m aware someone I don’t know well is unhappy, I’ll usually try and be kind to them even when I’ll never meet them again. Why not? I  take particular care with people like service workers, homeless people, janitors and so on. These people are regarded by most as human appliances (janitors, service workers) or as unpleasant human trash (the homeless.)

They don’t get a lot of kindness or care, so a little goes a long way.

We’re all human. We all can suffer. And we don’t have anything but each other. This is true between us and animals too, in a different way. Not human, no, but they feel pain, many of them feel love, and we are lesser if we do not see the bond of consciousness between us.

Generally, as I used to write a lot, the right thing to do is the right thing to do. For you, and for everyone around you.

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I Suffered, Therefore So Must Others

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On November 16, 2020

48 Comments

I want to expand on this idea, ably put my Amal El-Mohtar here:

This idea seems right: the first is better than the second.

But the actual correct stance is:

This bad thing never happened to me BUT I can imagine how horrible it would be, so I want to make sure it doesn’t happen to other people.

None of us, no matter how bad our lives are, have experienced all the horrible things that can happen. Conservatives are notorious for being terrible except about one thing, you dig and it’s “My child got esophagal cancer so now I champion that,” OR “Someone I care about was shot with an assault rifle so now I’m against that.”

Imaginative empathy allows us to imagine being a blood diamond slave in the Congo, or there during a school shooting, or suffering from grinding poverty even if we’ve had good lives. It allows us to be disgusted and horrified by people cleaning out sewers by hand (Indians euphemistically call this “manual scavenging”) or what it’s like to suffer from anti-black racism or caste oppression. We don’t need to have suffered something either to say, “Others should suck it up,” or “Others shouldn’t have to go through what I did.”

This isn’t a call to removing all risk and stress from life. Not all unpleasant events are bad. The general rule, now well-supported by various studies, is that short term stress is good, and chronic stress is bad.

When I went to school, we had exam hell week: one before Christmas, one at the end of the year. The final exam week usually determined 50 percent of our marks.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

This arrangement made for “good stress:” it was short-term and made you learn how to take high-impact tests. I’ve never feared a test since then: I assume I can pass any academic test, if given enough time to study, and my idea of enough time is a lot less than most people’s.

We don’t want to protect people from good stress — from short term challenges that teach them what they can do.

Chronic stress or traumatic stress, however, we do want to avoid. No one is improved by rape (prison administrators take note). No one is improved by being poor for years or even months on end. No one is improved by chronic hunger or fear.

The larger questions are why some people are unable to employ imaginative empathy: Why they must experience hell first-hand to realize “Oh! Hell is bad!” and why some can’t extrapolate this to “All hells are bad.”

Life is better with happy, healthy people. Heaven and Hell are both other people: if you’re surrounded by happy, loving people, odds are you’ll be happy. If you don’t start that way, you’ll almost certainly wind up that way. We shouldn’t want our fellow citizens to be subject to damaging long-term stress of traumatic events simply because we have to live with them.

The exception, alas, is that some people can’t learn that something is bad if it doesn’t happen to them. Their depraved indifference is a danger to everyone around them and a challenge to ethics. The people who need to be poor or spend time disabled or seriously sick are the people who think it’s no big deal. Some people, it seems, can only learn that “Hell is bad” if they or perhaps someone they love, spends time in Hell.

El-Mohtar’s tweet, of course, was about the possibility of Biden using an executive order to forgive $50k of student debt.

The good way to do it would be to get rid of the bankruptcy bill Biden pushed that made it impossible for student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, which would sort the situation out fast (it is NEVER a good idea to make it so that creditors do not have to worry about non payment. NEVER.)

But Biden probably won’t have control of Congress, and this is better than doing nothing, even if some people who have paid off student loans feel it is “unfair.” It was unfair they had usurious loans, but just because they suffered doesn’t mean others should.

The best solution, of course, would be to go back to 60s-style universities where tuition is either cheap or non-existent. The cost is a lot less than any of the repeated bailouts of rich people and could be made even lower by doing something about university admin bloat (that’s an entire other article I may write one day) and a more complete solution would be to do something about credential inflation: Most jobs don’t need a degree and the idea that they do today is absurd.

But what Biden can do is forgive $50K with an admin order and he should. It’s a good thing he can do, and if it doesn’t relieve the suffering of people in the past, well, hopefully you are, at least, the sort of person who doesn’t want others to suffer like you did.

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Understanding Through Empathy

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On May 28, 2009

5 Comments

Having read Lance Mannion on empathy, I want to talk about what it is, and why people fear it. Empathy just means you understand what another feels.  (Or, as modern brain science and ancient common sense tells us that you “feel” what others feel.)  It’s morally neutral, but without empathy it’s very probably you can’t make it to sympathy.  Empathy is the quality that lets you “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”.

It can be used for good or evil, but it tends towards good.  Usually, if we feel someone’s pain, we don’t want to add to it, since doing so will add to our pain.  However, there’s no question that in some cases, and for some people, the pain of others is pleasurable.

Also understanding someone else is the best first step to defeating them or hurting them horribly, which is one reason why those who know us best are the ones who can hurt us the most, because they know where the tender spots and the vulnerabilities are.  The best martial artists often talk about becoming one with the person they fight and competitive athletes use empathy to crush their opponents, as do good generals.

There is no deep understanding without empathy.  If you cannot walk in another’s shoes; if you cannot feel their pains and their joys, then you do not understand them.  Period.

People fear empathy because most people can’t avoid going from empathy to sympathy and because they think that if they feel even an echo they become that person.  They think “if I understand, if I feel what a terrorist/murderer/rapist/other bad person feels, if I know why they do what they do, I am like them”. And they believe that if they feel what a bad person felt, then they will feel sympathy for that person, and they only want to feel sympathy for good people, and for victims, not for those who have done evil.  Who perhaps are evil.

They don’t want to recognize, among other things, the evil in themselves and what they have in common with those who have done evil.

Likewise empathy requires the ability to forget about yourself for a time, to lose yourself and become someone else.  That loss of self, temporary as it is, is frightening to many.

But when you fail to empathize with those you disagree with you fail to understand them.  Instead of understanding them you label them–you give them a name you think covers what they are.  So you call them a terrorist, or you call them evil, or you call them a liberal or a conservative or a nazi.  Nothing wrong with any of those words, they describe things in the world.  But if you don’t understand people you may apply the wrong word to them, or you may apply a word that covers only part of what they are.  And then they will act in ways that surprise you, because you’ve only labeled them, not understood them.

Sometimes that doesn’t matter, because they’re too weak to matter or they are too remote from you for your opinion to be of any concern.  But sometimes it does matter.  If you think all Iraqis are sand niggers who only understand force, for example, well you’re going to treat them in a certain way, aren’t you?  And if they aren’t just sand niggers who only understand force, well, maybe that’s going to backfire.  If you think a Presidential candidate is a liberal and a progressive, and give him money, time and your vote, and he isn’t, well, that has consequences, doesn’t it?  If you think that an organization as complex as Hezbollah are “just terrorists”, well, you’re going to be surprised when they don’t act like “just terrorists” most of the time and you get your ass handed to you by them.

Etc…

Empathy isn’t a fuzzy virtue.  It isn’t even a virtue at all, it is an ability.  It can be used for good, or for evil.  Once you understand someone you can use that understanding to help them, to heal them, to hurt them or to destroy them.  Reject empathy and you reject understanding your fellow humans as well as you otherwise could.  In war, that can lead to defeat; in justice that can lead to injustice; and in relationships that kills love.

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