(04-17-2019 11:23 AM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  I think those surveys could be hogwash. I think people today are much more involuntarily tolerant of all kinds of degenerate behavior.

FIFY. Empathy is a hard ideal to reach when every special interest and degenerate behavior is awarded victimization status, and then those awarded such status feel entitled to parade around and claim faux outrage at the most minute perceived social aggressions perceived against them .

(04-17-2019 11:08 AM)king king Wrote:  

(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...

You can always leave.

(04-17-2019 08:35 PM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 11:08 AM)king king Wrote:  

(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:  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...

You can always leave.

Nah, been here longer than you. You should go first.

(04-17-2019 09:46 PM)king king Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:35 PM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 11:08 AM)king king Wrote:  

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

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

You can always leave.

Nah, been here longer than you. You should go first.

I'm not the one complaining, you are.

I guess the stir the pot thing is lost on you....

Lighten up, Frances.

(04-17-2019 08:29 PM)ODUsmitty Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 11:23 AM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  I think those surveys could be hogwash. I think people today are much more involuntarily tolerant of all kinds of degenerate behavior.

FIFY. Empathy is a hard ideal to reach when every special interest and degenerate behavior is awarded victimization status, and then those awarded such status feel entitled to parade around and claim faux outrage at the most minute perceived social aggressions perceived against them .

I would also add that empathy and people being empathetic takes a severe hit when they see others blatantly cheating and gaming the system.

I find it hard to empathize with people who claim they "just can't afford" food that put groceries they just bought on the EBT card into their $50k SUV. I find it hard to empathize with people who claim they "just can't afford" health insurance then go on Medicaid only to sit in the bar and drink & smoke all weekend. I find it hard to empathize with people who collect welfare benefits that have nicer things than I do when I'm the one who goes to work everyday. Thing is I actually know people who fall into those categories and I'd bet that most of us do as well.

Are there people who legitimately need these benefits? Sure, but I find it hard to empathize when there's just as many people who DON'T need it collecting.

See enough of it and eventually you fall into the "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" faction.

(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....

Since the advent of the internet and desktop computers we have been exposed to more and more of everything, from violence to sexual deviancy to outright horror to the point that we have become jaded, it no longer effects us viscerally like it did when I was about your age. When they first introduced the modern desktop it's price was prohibitive for most people so not everyone had access, fast forward to the present and who doesn't own a smartphone, laptop or tablet with which they can connect instantly to any story on the net. Repeated exposure to horrific events hardens the perception of those witnessing them so there goes your empathy right out the Windows10.

And Ayn Rand says screw your empathy, consider yourself first and foremost.

(04-17-2019 08:29 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(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:  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.

How do you even hold that big brained head up???

(04-18-2019 06:42 AM)BadgerMJ Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 08:29 PM)ODUsmitty Wrote:  

(04-17-2019 11:23 AM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  I think those surveys could be hogwash. I think people today are much more involuntarily tolerant of all kinds of degenerate behavior.

FIFY. Empathy is a hard ideal to reach when every special interest and degenerate behavior is awarded victimization status, and then those awarded such status feel entitled to parade around and claim faux outrage at the most minute perceived social aggressions perceived against them .

I would also add that empathy and people being empathetic takes a severe hit when they see others blatantly cheating and gaming the system.

I find it hard to empathize with people who claim they "just can't afford" food that put groceries they just bought on the EBT card into their $50k SUV. I find it hard to empathize with people who claim they "just can't afford" health insurance then go on Medicaid only to sit in the bar and drink & smoke all weekend. I find it hard to empathize with people who collect welfare benefits that have nicer things than I do when I'm the one who goes to work everyday. Thing is I actually know people who fall into those categories and I'd bet that most of us do as well.

Are there people who legitimately need these benefits? Sure, but I find it hard to empathize when there's just as many people who DON'T need it collecting.

See enough of it and eventually you fall into the "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" faction.

Excellent observation, I do indeed know people like those you've described. I know one guy who was an accomplished tool and die guy who taught himself how to run CAD/CAM applications , something that takes some degree of intelligence, who simply quit his job one day and now works for 10 bucks an hour - cash - selling CBD Oil in a local mall and collects 500 bucks a month in food stamps. When you talk to him he evokes sympathy and I suppose empathy until he's gone and you reconsider his words. He's adopted a victim mentality. Oh, and he calls himself a republican.