Hyperempathy, and why I am an asshole to friends on the Internet

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

It’s been some years since I read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, although I’ve been pondering a re-read for a variety of reasons. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, suffers from an affliction called “hyperempathy,” in which she inappropriately identifies with and experiences the emotions of others.

In the dystopian near-future America of Parable, hyperempathy is considered a congenital disease and a delusion, the fault of mothers who took a specific drug during pregnancy. And in Lauren’s world, it’s easy to see why empathy is considered disease. It’s a society coming apart at the seams, full of violence and poverty, attacks on minorities, and pure selfishness. Caring about the pain of another being is considered weakness.

I haven’t re-read Parable because it’s too close to our own current societal degeneration: the “greed is good” ethos, the increasingly violent tribalism (particularly white nationalism), the utter lack of community trust — encouraged by elites who stand to benefit, and who will never be impacted in their gated communities. (Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series offers a very similar vision.)

On a personal level, I have always had something very much akin to hyperempathy. I was the kid in elementary school who cried when other people were yelled at or punished, even if those kids were assholes to me. I was regularly and soundly mocked for it by the adults in my life, who viewed it as their duty to get me to “toughen up” — to care only about my family and close associates and tribe, to view others’ pain with indifference (if not amusement), to develop “thick skin” and never show emotion myself.

Here’s the thing, though: Empathy is not illness. Compassion is not weakness. Selfishness is not virtue.

In fact, compassion — which derives from a Latin word meaning “to suffer with” — is the greatest of strengths. Empathy derives from the German Einfühlung, meaning simply “in feeling.” Empathy isn’t just the human condition, but the condition of all social animals capable of emotion: We all feel, and we share our feelings with others.

A willingness to share others’ emotional states — not just witness them like a scientist looking at a laboratory animal — takes sensitivity, a delicate ability to take your tools of perception and turn them outward, regarding something other than your own self-interest. It takes internal fortitude as well because, as I explained in a previous entry, as living beings we are hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Compassion and empathy are, in fact, what separates social animals from, say, tigers and sharks. More than humans experience it. My cat, who sees when I can’t sleep, sits on me and purrs until I do, is in fact experiencing a variety of it. (Yes, feline haters, house cats are social. They’re house lions, really.)

To have empathy, you must recognize the other entity in the exchange as capable of feeling. To have compassion, you must recognize the intrinsic worth — as opposed to the use-value — of the Other in the exchange.

This is a Druid blog, of course, and like most Pagans I have an animist bent. That means I can (and do) extend compassion and empathy to entities others would consider insensate, inanimate or frankly imaginary. I don’t damage anything — even crumple a piece of paper — without cause because I recognize the paper as having a value going beyond sheer use. In short, I do experience that piece of paper as sensate. I hate even using the word “object” because I regard everything that exists as a subject.

In Lauren Olamina’s world and in our own, I would be considered diseased — with hyperempathy.

I have never been satisfied with surface answers, and always try to see into the heart of matters. With that in mind, I think I can say our cultural aversion to empathy and compassion is based largely on fear. So is anger and violence, for the most part. We are afraid of being vulnerable, of having others exercise power over our fragile bodies and minds. Those few we are not afraid of — members of our tribe, our immediate families — we can extend our basic social-mammalness to (or not, in the case of dysfunctional families). To everyone else, we try to be tigers.

We are also afraid of the vagaries of fate — illness, death, the bad luck that leads to a string of accidents ultimately landing us in poverty. In order to ward off this fear, we shutter our compassion toward those experiencing such maladies and shun them. It makes a certain logical sense: an animal shunning a diseased member of its kind to avoid contagion. Or, stealing the food of the weak to shore ourselves through tough times to come — preserving one’s own continued existence over anything and anyone else.

This is what I see. And that’s why I am such an asshole on social media.

When people of my acquaintance — usually those of a “libertarian” bent — argue against helping other people, I argue back. Here are the kind of statements I tend to argue with, exaggerated because the exaggeration more easily shows the real impetus behind it:

• Why should the government use my money to educate your kids? Or provide them (or you) with healthcare or food stamps when you lose your job? You breed ’em, you feed ’em. Go eat trash or starve.
• By offering healthcare to all, you will be subsidizing bad decisions. If you know that you can get healthcare no matter what, no one will bother working and everyone will be chugging two-liter bottles of Sprite, riding motorcycles and mainlining bacon.
• Why should I help subsidize your healthcare? What’s happening to you is a result of your own decisions. I mean, you wouldn’t need maternity if you didn’t decide to get knocked up, you whore. You wouldn’t have cancer if you restricted yourself to happy thoughts. Diabetes? Should have put down those candy bars. No, I think Type 1 is just bullshit. We all know fibromyalgia is fake.
• Why should we help refugees? They should stay in their own countries to fix them — just like my ancestors did. Oh, wait…. Well, my ancestors at least came the right way: They came at a time when there were absolutely no immigration restrictions. Today’s immigrants need to be responsible and invent a time machine that will take them back to pre-1924.
• Well, their parents shouldn’t have tried to get into this country illegally. That makes it a-okay from us to put little kids into concentration camps and keep them dirty and starving. I mean, their parents obviously didn’t care, so we shouldn’t either. As for their parents, why don’t we just drop the bodies over the fence?

I won’t even get into the blatantly racist and sexist stuff because, even with humor, I just don’t have the stomach for it.

What all these arguments have in common is a complete lack of empathy and compassion. It’s a view that the Other — the poor, the immigrant, the person in need of healthcare — doesn’t have the same capacity for feeling as the tribe. The Other exists only to steal resources from the tribe.

This is the mindset behind fascism. 

Fascism is, in essence, extreme tribalism. It doesn’t start with political parties or televised demagogues or concentration camps. It starts with teaching your kids that compassion is weakness, empathy is wrong, and that other people aren’t as worthy — as human — as your family and friends, your race, your social or religious group. It starts with abuse — done with the best intentions, of course, to get folks to “toughen up” for a cold, cruel world.

Lauren Olamina’s hyperempathy is her true strength — and what allows her to offer a radically different vision and ultimately create a radically different subculture.

I want to say that we are called upon to be warriors for compassion, but I dislike the term “warrior”; it encapsulates the violent, Us-Versus-Other mindset that is the basis of our existential problem. So I’ll use different terminology.

Like Lauren, we are called upon to be changers. To draw upon the well of compassion deep within us all and unplug it. To point out the value of our fellow beings over and over again, if necessary. To call out the ways that fear twists truth into unnatural shapes.

In the words of Lauren Olamina: “Embrace diversity. Unite — or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed by those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity or be destroyed.”