Interesting article. Especially near the end when she talks about the solution being to embrace empathy not as altruistic but as purely a selfish thing to be able to expand your own imagination and frame of reference.

I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000. I think we can all see that it's happening all around us as the divide gets bigger and the entrenchment deeper.

Link here


The End Of Empathy

April 15, 20195:00 AM ET

Hanna Rosin

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of "the fathers, the mothers, the children" who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy's appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an "empathy pill" so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It's strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.




I'd add that there is a perversion to the SJW culture that no one in that culture seems able to see - this idea that by completely rejecting outright the views of another person in favor of one's OWN idea of what fair or equal treatment is, the SJW him or herself becomes exactly like what they claim to abhor. It's the paradox of "tolerance" as I like to call it. Or, "you're marginalizing these people, so in an effort to stand up for someone else I'm going to do whatever I can to silence and marginalize you". In the name of equality and all that....

empathy died when politics became such a team game.

(04-17-2019 08:21 AM)fsquid Wrote:  empathy died when politics became such a team game.

that's XACLY! a perfect summation....couldn't have framed it better....

it's ironic when you think about it....everything the dems once placated, has become the antithesis....

#fknidiots

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  Interesting article. Especially near the end when she talks about the solution being to embrace empathy not as altruistic but as purely a selfish thing to be able to expand your own imagination and frame of reference.

I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000. I think we can all see that it's happening all around us as the divide gets bigger and the entrenchment deeper.

Link here


The End Of Empathy

April 15, 20195:00 AM ET

Hanna Rosin

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of "the fathers, the mothers, the children" who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy's appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an "empathy pill" so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It's strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.




I'd add that there is a perversion to the SJW culture that no one in that culture seems able to see - this idea that by completely rejecting outright the views of another person in favor of one's OWN idea of what fair or equal treatment is, the SJW him or herself becomes exactly like what they claim to abhor. It's the paradox of "tolerance" as I like to call it. Or, "you're marginalizing these people, so in an effort to stand up for someone else I'm going to do whatever I can to silence and marginalize you". In the name of equality and all that....

2016 is a perfect example. Life expectancy is declining in this country. Blue collar, HS educated people are dying of drugs and suicides. Donald Trump, of all people, was the only one of the 22 candidates to have empathy for these people. The Democrats all called them deplorables.

(04-17-2019 08:26 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  Interesting article. Especially near the end when she talks about the solution being to embrace empathy not as altruistic but as purely a selfish thing to be able to expand your own imagination and frame of reference.

I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000. I think we can all see that it's happening all around us as the divide gets bigger and the entrenchment deeper.

Link here


The End Of Empathy

April 15, 20195:00 AM ET

Hanna Rosin

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of "the fathers, the mothers, the children" who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy's appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an "empathy pill" so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It's strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.




I'd add that there is a perversion to the SJW culture that no one in that culture seems able to see - this idea that by completely rejecting outright the views of another person in favor of one's OWN idea of what fair or equal treatment is, the SJW him or herself becomes exactly like what they claim to abhor. It's the paradox of "tolerance" as I like to call it. Or, "you're marginalizing these people, so in an effort to stand up for someone else I'm going to do whatever I can to silence and marginalize you". In the name of equality and all that....

2016 is a perfect example. Life expectancy is declining in this country. Blue collar, HS educated people are dying of drugs and suicides. Donald Trump, of all people, was the only one of the 22 candidates to have empathy for these people. The Democrats all called them deplorables.

What you call empathy I see as purely opportunity.

Potato poe-tah-toe

(04-17-2019 08:30 AM)king king Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:26 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  Interesting article. Especially near the end when she talks about the solution being to embrace empathy not as altruistic but as purely a selfish thing to be able to expand your own imagination and frame of reference.

I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000. I think we can all see that it's happening all around us as the divide gets bigger and the entrenchment deeper.

Link here


The End Of Empathy

April 15, 20195:00 AM ET

Hanna Rosin

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of "the fathers, the mothers, the children" who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy's appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an "empathy pill" so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It's strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.




I'd add that there is a perversion to the SJW culture that no one in that culture seems able to see - this idea that by completely rejecting outright the views of another person in favor of one's OWN idea of what fair or equal treatment is, the SJW him or herself becomes exactly like what they claim to abhor. It's the paradox of "tolerance" as I like to call it. Or, "you're marginalizing these people, so in an effort to stand up for someone else I'm going to do whatever I can to silence and marginalize you". In the name of equality and all that....

2016 is a perfect example. Life expectancy is declining in this country. Blue collar, HS educated people are dying of drugs and suicides. Donald Trump, of all people, was the only one of the 22 candidates to have empathy for these people. The Democrats all called them deplorables.

What you call empathy I see as purely opportunity.

Potato poe-tah-toe

He had to have empathy to understand the problem even existed. Nobody else did.
Sounds like you have no empathy for Donald Trump.

I believe Trump did have empathy for those people. The promises he made them are unrealistic though.

(04-17-2019 08:36 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:30 AM)king king Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:26 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  Interesting article. Especially near the end when she talks about the solution being to embrace empathy not as altruistic but as purely a selfish thing to be able to expand your own imagination and frame of reference.

I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000. I think we can all see that it's happening all around us as the divide gets bigger and the entrenchment deeper.

Link here


The End Of Empathy

April 15, 20195:00 AM ET

Hanna Rosin

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of "the fathers, the mothers, the children" who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy's appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an "empathy pill" so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It's strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.




I'd add that there is a perversion to the SJW culture that no one in that culture seems able to see - this idea that by completely rejecting outright the views of another person in favor of one's OWN idea of what fair or equal treatment is, the SJW him or herself becomes exactly like what they claim to abhor. It's the paradox of "tolerance" as I like to call it. Or, "you're marginalizing these people, so in an effort to stand up for someone else I'm going to do whatever I can to silence and marginalize you". In the name of equality and all that....

2016 is a perfect example. Life expectancy is declining in this country. Blue collar, HS educated people are dying of drugs and suicides. Donald Trump, of all people, was the only one of the 22 candidates to have empathy for these people. The Democrats all called them deplorables.

What you call empathy I see as purely opportunity.

Potato poe-tah-toe

He had to have empathy to understand the problem even existed. Nobody else did.
Sounds like you have no empathy for Donald Trump.

I cant argue with that.

I still see it as he rode the wave that the opportunity provided.

I can see he and his planning committee asking themselves, "Who are the most disenfranchised people in the US today? Oh, well duh, it's blue collar white people! Hey, thanks, Obama! Sure, Don, run on the Republican ticket and show concern for their plight and they'll flock to you. We will steal this election out from under the Dem's noses."

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000.

The dawn of the Internet and social media, where everything is viewed behind a screen, not face to face.

(04-17-2019 08:30 AM)king king Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:26 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  Interesting article. Especially near the end when she talks about the solution being to embrace empathy not as altruistic but as purely a selfish thing to be able to expand your own imagination and frame of reference.

I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000. I think we can all see that it's happening all around us as the divide gets bigger and the entrenchment deeper.

Link here


The End Of Empathy

April 15, 20195:00 AM ET

Hanna Rosin

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of "the fathers, the mothers, the children" who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy's appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an "empathy pill" so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It's strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.




I'd add that there is a perversion to the SJW culture that no one in that culture seems able to see - this idea that by completely rejecting outright the views of another person in favor of one's OWN idea of what fair or equal treatment is, the SJW him or herself becomes exactly like what they claim to abhor. It's the paradox of "tolerance" as I like to call it. Or, "you're marginalizing these people, so in an effort to stand up for someone else I'm going to do whatever I can to silence and marginalize you". In the name of equality and all that....

2016 is a perfect example. Life expectancy is declining in this country. Blue collar, HS educated people are dying of drugs and suicides. Donald Trump, of all people, was the only one of the 22 candidates to have empathy for these people. The Democrats all called them deplorables.

What you call empathy I see as purely opportunity.

Potato poe-tah-toe

Ditto.

When Slick Willie uttered "I feel your pain", was it empathy or a shrewd political move?

Politics is all about getting people to buy into your message. If that means "spreading it on thick", you do so.

I'm sure Trump recognized there was a problem and it was effecting these people. I'm sure he was concerned, but empathy might be a bit much.

(04-17-2019 08:54 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000.

The dawn of the Internet and social media, where everything is viewed behind a screen, not face to face.

It goes beyond that.

The internet has allowed people the opportunity to access more sources and hear more opinions on all sorts of issues.

We used to "take people's word" when it came to what was going on in the community. We used to get our information from the news, papers, neighbors, etc.

Someone could tell us it was raining when the TRUTH was they were peeing on our head. Now we have the ability to look it up and decide for ourselves.

Were we REALLY more empathetic or was it just gullible?

(04-17-2019 09:00 AM)BadgerMJ Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:54 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000.

The dawn of the Internet and social media, where everything is viewed behind a screen, not face to face.

It goes beyond that.

The internet has allowed people the opportunity to access more sources and hear more opinions on all sorts of issues.

We used to "take people's word" when it came to what was going on in the community. We used to get our information from the news, papers, neighbors, etc.

Someone could tell us it was raining when the TRUTH was they were peeing on our head. Now we have the ability to look it up and decide for ourselves.

Were we REALLY more empathetic or was it just gullible?

The problem is too many people aren't using the Internet to hear more opinions, understand other viewpoints, and 'get to the truth.' For many, it's about finding like-minded individuals to confirm previously held beliefs amidst a flurry of Facebook memes and Twitter hashtags.

If information was too lacking or difficult/slow to access in 1989, it's feels far too instantaneous and constant in 2019. In desperate need to get clicks, promote an agenda, or "go viral", misinformation can now spread like wildfire in a matter of minutes. And once upon a time, a guy with a few screws loose would need to work pretty hard to find an extremist group to hook up with. Now, easy peasy.

I know I'm sounding like some old man yelling at a cloud, but online social media is really troubling.

(04-17-2019 08:54 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000.

The dawn of the Internet and social media, where everything is viewed behind a screen, not face to face.

I think a lot of it is the move to big cities. People are more crowded, so they want to distance themselves from the crowds. And they do it by living among people like themselves. In small towns, you can't get away from people who don't think or live like you.

We haven't had an immigration policy that works for America in many decades at least. Instead, we have a policy designed to benefit political parties (I'd argue Democrats are worse, but both parties are guilty). We have scientists leaving because they get fed up with the immigration system but low-skill individuals can pretty much stick around indefinitely.

Meanwhile, rich liberals whose jobs aren't threatened by immigration and who would sooner go kayaking in a hurricane than live in a neighborhood with these immigrants call people concerned about immigration racist bigots.

This didn't start with Trump. It's been brewing for a long time.

(04-17-2019 09:20 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 09:00 AM)BadgerMJ Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:54 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000.

The dawn of the Internet and social media, where everything is viewed behind a screen, not face to face.

It goes beyond that.

The internet has allowed people the opportunity to access more sources and hear more opinions on all sorts of issues.

We used to "take people's word" when it came to what was going on in the community. We used to get our information from the news, papers, neighbors, etc.

Someone could tell us it was raining when the TRUTH was they were peeing on our head. Now we have the ability to look it up and decide for ourselves.

Were we REALLY more empathetic or was it just gullible?

The problem is too many people aren't using the Internet to hear more opinions, understand other viewpoints, and 'get to the truth.' For many, it's about finding like-minded individuals to confirm previously held beliefs amidst a flurry of Facebook memes and Twitter hashtags.

If information was too lacking or difficult/slow to access in 1989, it's feels far too instantaneous and constant in 2019. In desperate need to get clicks, promote an agenda, or "go viral", misinformation can now spread like wildfire in a matter of minutes. And once upon a time, a guy with a few screws loose would need to work pretty hard to find an extremist group to hook up with. Now, easy peasy.

I know I'm sounding like some old man yelling at a cloud, but online social media is really troubling.

I agree, there's A LOT of that. Too much many times.

On the flipside, it's a chance to get those "dirty little secrets" out that some wished to keep hidden.

Perfect example was the ACT 10 battle here in Wisconsin. For too long we were just expected to "believe" that school districts were wisely spending our money and everything was "for the children". Because of internet sources, the word finally came out that "the children" were taking a backseat to the will of the teacher's union and in fact our money WASN'T benefiting the children so much as it was lining teacher pockets.

Before that, bits of information wouldn't have been known unless the local paper decided to report it, which most times they chose NOT to.

(04-17-2019 09:20 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 09:00 AM)BadgerMJ Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:54 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000.

The dawn of the Internet and social media, where everything is viewed behind a screen, not face to face.

It goes beyond that.

The internet has allowed people the opportunity to access more sources and hear more opinions on all sorts of issues.

We used to "take people's word" when it came to what was going on in the community. We used to get our information from the news, papers, neighbors, etc.

Someone could tell us it was raining when the TRUTH was they were peeing on our head. Now we have the ability to look it up and decide for ourselves.

Were we REALLY more empathetic or was it just gullible?

The problem is too many people aren't using the Internet to hear more opinions, understand other viewpoints, and 'get to the truth.' For many, it's about finding like-minded individuals to confirm previously held beliefs amidst a flurry of Facebook memes and Twitter hashtags.

If information was too lacking or difficult/slow to access in 1989, it's feels far too instantaneous and constant in 2019. In desperate need to get clicks, promote an agenda, or "go viral", misinformation can now spread like wildfire in a matter of minutes. And once upon a time, a guy with a few screws loose would need to work pretty hard to find an extremist group to hook up with. Now, easy peasy.

I know I'm sounding like some old man yelling at a cloud, but online social media is really troubling.

Reminds me at times of this board...

I think those surveys could be hogwash. I think people today are much more accepting of or empathetic of all kinds of degenerate behavior.

I agree that it is a problem. I am a conservative but I see my fellow conservatives show a lack of empathy regularly. Not to say you don't see it on the liberal side as well, but it does seem like people don't try to understand the plight of others.

Everything is viewed through a political lens now. We also seem to focus on attacking people more than ideas (I am as guilty of this as anyone).

(04-17-2019 03:40 PM)DETLTU Wrote:  I agree that it is a problem. I am a conservative but I see my fellow conservatives show a lack of empathy regularly. Not to say you don't see it on the liberal side as well, but it does seem like people don't try to understand the plight of others.

Everything is viewed through a political lens now. We also seem to focus on attacking people more than ideas (I am as guilty of this as anyone).

When news and politics became entertainment for the masses is when I began to notice a deterioration of social graces on both sides where people no longer would even speak to people that didn't believe what they did. I have liberal friends and conservative friends and I'm amazed at times by the unfettered rage that spills from both sides' mouths about the other. I may not get your particular brand of idiocy but I'm still gonna invite you over and I dont think that your politics define you.

As an aside, it's funny to see folks on this board decry identity politics at every turn but then identify others solely based on their politics. Like, did you ever stop and think about how that comes across?

(04-17-2019 08:43 AM)king king Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:36 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:30 AM)king king Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:26 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:02 AM)king king Wrote:  Interesting article. Especially near the end when she talks about the solution being to embrace empathy not as altruistic but as purely a selfish thing to be able to expand your own imagination and frame of reference.

I wonder what causes the decline they're seeing since 2000. I think we can all see that it's happening all around us as the divide gets bigger and the entrenchment deeper.

Link here


The End Of Empathy

April 15, 20195:00 AM ET

Hanna Rosin

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of "the fathers, the mothers, the children" who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy's appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an "empathy pill" so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It's strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.




I'd add that there is a perversion to the SJW culture that no one in that culture seems able to see - this idea that by completely rejecting outright the views of another person in favor of one's OWN idea of what fair or equal treatment is, the SJW him or herself becomes exactly like what they claim to abhor. It's the paradox of "tolerance" as I like to call it. Or, "you're marginalizing these people, so in an effort to stand up for someone else I'm going to do whatever I can to silence and marginalize you". In the name of equality and all that....

2016 is a perfect example. Life expectancy is declining in this country. Blue collar, HS educated people are dying of drugs and suicides. Donald Trump, of all people, was the only one of the 22 candidates to have empathy for these people. The Democrats all called them deplorables.

What you call empathy I see as purely opportunity.

Potato poe-tah-toe

He had to have empathy to understand the problem even existed. Nobody else did.
Sounds like you have no empathy for Donald Trump.

I cant argue with that.

I still see it as he rode the wave that the opportunity provided.

I can see he and his planning committee asking themselves, "Who are the most disenfranchised people in the US today? Oh, well duh, it's blue collar white people! Hey, thanks, Obama! Sure, Don, run on the Republican ticket and show concern for their plight and they'll flock to you. We will steal this election out from under the Dem's noses."

All empathy dies with the assumptions you make about another's motives.

Listening is the key to empathy. In twenty years of non profit work you meet a lot of needy people. Some are con artists, some are desperate, some have given up, and some are simply crushed. None of them look like your peers so you have to listen to them to discern their level of anguish, ascertain their own understanding of their problems, to hear what it is they believe they need, and to gain that mile in their shoes, but through your perspective and expertise, before you make recommendations.

So to begin with it is no surprise that those who text their amputated thoughts to another who remotely replies should have no grasp of empathy. You can't empathize remotely. You can't empathize if you can't look someone in the eyes and feel how palpable the hurt and desperation is. Only then can you project yourself into their story and say but for the grace of God there go I, which is after all the essence of empathy.

But while you can have empathy for a person who is right in front of you and in pain or distress, you can't help effectively until you hear from their perspective what is wrong. That is where you have abandoned your projections of motive and really look at the issues with their eyes. Unfortunately perspectives are frequently more real to them than circumstances. Before you can address the circumstances you must first understand the perspective and if it is unrealistic, but believed, you have some work to do to get the perspective to match up with the assistance in order to reach an effective and mutually adopted plan of action. It is the trust gained between the one in need of help and the one seeking to help that is essential for the person to develop through the process and to find a sense of control and ownership over their self determination. The Christian might call that instilling hope through the grace of understanding the process that led to the crisis, and understanding the pathway out of it.

Empathy is not all that is lacking today. Neighborliness is being lost to the same devices of isolation which make all of us feel more vulnerable, give us a loss of trust in your fellow human since it's hard to trust what you don't really know, and worse still give you the fear that they have lost trust in you. One of the most destructive ironies of isolation is the projection of the fear of not being accepted onto those you don't know. It is so powerful that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

But the answers won't be popular. We need to turn off the tubes, leave the smart phones behind, and actually get to know one another warts and all. And that will not be popular at the Tech giants, nor will it be welcomed by the political spin meisters on each side of the aisle that are relying on that isolation and fear to manipulate their perceived constituents.

It's easy to fear different races, co-workers, neighbors, and even distant family if you don't break bread with them, share hopes and fears with them, and to learn that inside that different and sometimes distant exterior that you share your humanity with them.

As JFK said, and I loosely paraphrase, we all love our children, we all have hopes and dreams for the future, and we all share an existence on this globe. Soldiers don't get up in the morning wanting to kill other soldiers from other nations who bleed like they do, have families like they do, play games like they do, and who under any other circumstance might have been neighbors, friends, or kindred spirits. Nations do.

The growing antipathy for religion is another projection of the fear of rejection. It's yet another destruction of a weekly event that actually brought people together, and church pulpits in my area are now TV screens upon which the sermon of a popular minister is some nearby city is projected to its branch churches where people aren't asked to get involved, not asked to do missions to the homeless, home bound, or to the hospitals and nursing homes. They are just asked to sit in a cushioned chair, observe the sermon, and leave some cash /or credit swipes.

If people aren't even face to face with their minister, and if the church is no longer taking its people face to face with the needy in their community, it is not surprising to me that empathy is dying. And if devices become, as I have witnessed, an acceptable means of communication for those under the same roof, rather than face to face interaction, then we have little hope of rectifying this crisis in humanity.