I realize I didn’t address your other questions. You ask whether empathy requires knowledge of the other person. I would say of course it does! Without any such knowledge there would be no basis for empathy? Maybe I misunderstood you?

You also ask whether accurate information is required in order to feel empathy. To this I would say of course not! One can feel empathy for fictional characters. Tom Joad for example. But I believe that accurate information IS necessary if one looks to his or her empathy to instruct on how to act. Or at least a healthy suspicion that one may not have all of the facts.

Hope that makes sense.

Paul

Great question. I have been thinking about this since you asked it and have nothing to offer other than the idea that apathy may have more than one parent - for some it could be psychopathic, for others it could be simple lack of time to consider the matter due to other pressing needs. In the latter sense empathy can be seen as a luxury available only to those who are not experiencing any personal crisis requiring all of their attention.

In the former sense it could perhaps be personified by Stalin, whose childhood was by all accounts a horrific experience. I happen to be reading The Court of the Red Tsar right now, and just last night read that his first wife died “in his arms” of tuberculosis, and that at the funeral he remarked:

“This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for people.”

If this remark is taken at face value rather than as a cynical justification of himself, maybe apathy can spring from severe personal losses?

Paul

Without perfect information any “empathy” for another person or group is really just empathy for what you think about those other people or groups based on what you have been told about them.

Really great point, I think. It cuts to the heart of another question though: where does apathy come from? From the heart or from the head? Is it conditional upon received or perceived knowledge about the other person? Do you really need to know or have accurate knowledge to feel emapthy?

I don’t think common empathies alone would create cohesive political groups,

Just to clarify, that wasn’t quite what I was suggesting, but it is an interesting conclusion.

You ask lots of good questions there. I don’t know anything about the pharmas so I’ll let that be.

Thinking about empathy: One big problem is the quality of information available about other people. A very famous example would be Walter Duranty’s coverage of the situation in Russia during the early 1930s for the NY Times. If you had read his reports (which earned him a Pulitzer) at the time, you would have come away feeling that the government was doing a difficult but necessary job by collectivizing the farms, and that the Russian people would be better as a result. And so you may have empathized with the government. You would not, however, have learned that millions of peasants were being starved to death, on purpose, in service of this policy. If you had known that, it might have shifted your empathy.

Certainly, good information is more readily available today, but you have to be willing to look for it, and even then it is not perfect. Without perfect information any “empathy” for another person or group is really just empathy for what you think about those other people or groups based on what you have been told about them.

But even if this problem could be solved, I don’t think common empathies alone would create cohesive political groups, because I think that people would continue to disagree on how to solve problems. Take for example the current Israeli/Hezbollah clash. Though we can all agree that the loss of any life is a tragedy, I’m sure we don’t agree on what course of action would provide the best chance of reducing the number of lives lost there over time. Imagine a group of people who empathize with Israel. Within that group, some would say that Israel should not respond militarily to attacks on its soil because violence begets violence. Others would say that Israel must respond militarily because, if it does not, it is just inviting more attacks, and more bloodshed.

The pain you feel, contrary to what the pushers, I mean, doctors will tell you, is a perfectly normal reaction to things like, oh, I don’t know, a general sense of powerlessness that results from living alienated in a totalitarian society with it’s priorities almost completely divorced from natural human needs. Or perhaps being continuously faced with complex problems like overpopulation, pollution, war, poverty, and crime while feeling disempowered to act to mitigate those problems.

These things are the stimulus, the response is the bad feelings, which manifest as a chemical reaction. The drug is the “solution” to the chemical reaction, and thus the bad feelings, but NOT a solution to the stimulus. To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, reality is what does not go away when you are blissed or benumbed out of your mind.

For example, right after 9/11, did anyone notice an increased prevalence of antidepressant and antianxiety medication advertisements on the telly? Does anyone really think that the increase in prescriptions and windfall to Big Pharma et al. was caused by a sudden increase in real insanity, as opposed to a normal reaction to a traumatic event?

Are meds the only way to cope with traumatic events? No, but they are one of the profitable ways. If that John Forbes Nash could cure his insanity, I think the vast majority of people could learn to cope with theirs. The tools are out there for those who are looking for them.

What strikes me is that it seems as though Rubin learned how to turn off his empathy through EST training. I wonder how widespread a goal this type of thing is within the broader realms of therapy - getting people to focus down on their own problems and their own goals in their lives. Any thoughts?

That’s the thing about most of this stuff: it’s entirely value-neutral. As John C. Lily said about LSD, what frightened the people in power most about it, from his experience and insight, was that LSD could, when not being abused, but used for entirely neutral purposes. The states it induced could be used to train an ice figure skater to be a much better ice figure skater. Or it could be used to remove utterly a soldier’s remorse. By increasing the “psychoplasticity” one has, one can be molded for better or worse. That’s the thing about Scientology and EST etc., since they’re cults they seek to mold their members for the cult’s good, not the individual’s, hence the deserved bad press. Zac mentioned this and described it as “the transhuman arms race:” sure, you want to use nantotech to disable your reptilian brain at will. The government wants to use it track every chemical in your body. And an angry islamist engineer just had his last goat bombed by the USAF and he’s using it to make a grey goo device. As Ken Wilber points out, the more advanced a system or structure gets, the greater its potential to do good and evil.

It is abject looking at some of the right-wing blogs and the utter lack of empathy for the innocent children being murdered by big bombs.

I stopped dealing with that a long, long time ago. Firstly, for whatever reason, keeping with the current theme, right-wing types have an engrammatic block against realizing babies are dying; there’s also the implicit racism involved, as well. I never figured it out. But I discovered that many lefties were not so much “empathetic” as they were programmed to a certain response. Alan Bloom got at this, albeit very, very poorly and from some questionable intentions, in The Closing of the American Mind (not worth reading, big waste of time, btw)… I would frequently broach “political” ideas I held and get either a blank look or a response fitting for talk radio. They might be “sympathetic” to the plight of bombed babies, but it’s out of training and automatic response, not intention: it’s very “Brave New World.”

Tim, re: the antidepressants being anti-empathetic, I’ve used them, though never for a full month. One thing about “Zombie” is about right, though I found my zombification came not so much from feeling chemically neutralized but something else: the shit is toxic. I felt fine emotionally: I also felt like I was going to puke all day long, hence, I didn’t really do much of anything. The whole curbed sex drive thing is a huge issue, too.

‘Public Good & Common Good before individual greed.’

Regarding empathy: Several years ago, I went through a mind-altering state known as “pregnancy,” and at one point (for perhaps fifteen minutes) I identified with the entire planet. Who needs LSD when you’ve got a potent hormonal stew inside you?

And as an antidote for the sense that “the End is Near,” try viewing this Flash animation of the End of the World. (Warning: swearing and general hilarity.)

I still believe this. I think it’s really obvious why certain people group together to make parties n stuff, and that’s because they associate with eachother, simple as that. That can be good or very bad, depending on what they wanna do, and whether they’re associating to numb themselves from some horror that they’re collectively fearing.

One of the main themes of my book is going to be the primacy of empathy and how civilisation distorts empathy through isolation, alienation and strange hierarchical structures. I’ll be going on lots about a foundation that every human needs, and that that it is based in empathy more than anything. Empathy protects, and when it’s distorted or ignored, bad things happen.

Whilst spidering a chapter for my book on empathy I wrote this: “Empathy is the built-in knowledge that each exists in their own subjective reality, but that there are certain underlying needs that are vital in nourishing all humans and protecting them from suffering. Empathy is to “feel with” not “for”.

For more on politics and personality associations, check out what Ran just wrote about the Israel mess, and also what I wrote on it.

So I weaned myself off the drugs both times. I can’t say it was pleasant getting off them, but it’s possible. I won’t do an SSRI again unless it’s a life-threatening situation.

Dr Jose Delgado, a neurophsiologist at Yale University School, was especially interested in Electronic Stimulation of the Brain. By implanting a small probe into the brain, Delgado discovered that he could wield enormous power over his subject. Using a device he called the ’stimoceiver’ which operated by FM radio waves, he was able to electrically orchestrate a wide range of human emotions. These included rage, lust and fatigue.

Am I insane?

Nope, it’s the culture that’s insane.

http://www.popocculture.com/11/the-politics-of-experience-by-rd-laing

On a semi-related note; Is it just me, or is the whole fucking world tearing itself apart. I know the “The End id Near” thing is as old as time itself, but things seem pretty bad. Examples:

Middle East
Global Warming (hurricanes)
George W. taking away our rights
blah blah blah, you know the rest.

It just seems that instead of getting better, things are just getting started. I am actually considering preparing a fallout-type shelter. Am I insane?

it depends on what you mean by empathy

Not unless you start re-defining what empathy actually means: “Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives”

“Empathy for the self” then may communicate a value which is worthwhile and important to describe and feel somehow but it’s not empathy.

I don’t know if you know it or not, but I’ve been taking Luvox for about ten years by now. In the days of my “nervous breakdown” it turned out to be quite the godsend. What I was looking for were “answers” where there were none. I had to find them or else I would die in a horrible way — probably taking, I feared, people I loved with me. Once I began taking the fluvoxamine maleate and in a slow, few month long progression, what happened was not so much that the existential questions I needed answers to went away, but that the empathic sting of not having or getting them receded so that I could “function” again. But then I’ve long self-medicated anyhow.

Some drink to remember
Some drink to forget

Of course, fwiw, I am now down from 250mg a day (which is a lot for Luvox) to about the same in a week. Slowly, ever so slowly weening myself off. Don’t think for one second you can just go off the shit kids. You have to be patient as all hell.

Of course, one of the reasons I have been in a years long process of nixing Luvox from my drug intake is for the simple reason of this side-effect of that all SSRI’s seem to foment in some lucky customers called Akathisia.

Let me describe what akathisia is like. Keep in mind it comes on in the middle of mundaneness, such as cleaning or walking alone:

whatsthatidontknowiseethisthatarararararafuckfuckfuckwhosthat
dontknowcanttellnobodyshereimcrazyhurryuphurryhuphurryup

It took awhile to figure out from who, where or what I was getting these spells. The only “cure” I was able to find was slamming two three beers quickly and turning on at full blast every media device I could find. Only then would these confusing, out of this world sense of a demon inside me subside. The longer term fix turned out to be getting myself off the crap.

[Before EST training] He talks about burning down schools, dosing water supplies with LSD, fucking in the streets, all kinds of crazy stuff. But in this interview, he talks about how in days gone by he had a “martyr complex” and how he’s no longer so “overwhelmingly moved by injustice”. He hardly seems like the same person who was called before Congress to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committe multiple times, and came dressed as an American Revolutionary War soldier, a Viet Kong psychedelic hippy and Santa Claus.

What strikes me is that it seems as though Rubin learned how to turn off his empathy through EST training. I wonder how widespread a goal this type of thing is within the broader realms of therapy - getting people to focus down on their own problems and their own goals in their lives. Any thoughts?