Thomas told me something today that motivates me to define some terms.
As I’ve said, empathy is very different from compassion or sympathy for a person. We can feel sympathy for a friend, for example, because of their character.
We feel compassion for those who suffer. Perhaps it will surprise readers that I, the quintessential exterminationist, feel compassion when I see videos of both the Palestinians who suffered Israeli bombings—and the Israelis themselves who are mourning their dead from Iranian bombings!
Even Himmler, in the midst of the final solution to the Jewish problem, perfectly understood those soldiers who no longer wanted to work on that genocidal campaign and excused them from their duties, in addition to prohibiting gratuitous cruelty. (In a fictional context, recall a passage from The Turner Diaries. The omniscient narrator said that it was pointless to consider the morality of removing cancerous tissue; it was a task that simply had to be done to save the healthy tissue.)
I can feel compassion for the enemy, in the sense that while I want to exterminate them, I don’t want them to suffer (remember the four words: eliminate all unnecessary suffering). But empathy is something entirely different. According to Wikipedia:
Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person’s perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience…
The ability to imagine oneself as another person is a sophisticated process. However, the basic capacity to recognize emotions in others may be innate and may be achieved unconsciously.
Innate? No. I believe that babies aren’t born with autistic impairments or genetic defects that prevent them from developing empathy as adults. It is the environment, frequently the abusive childrearing, that stunts their ability to develop empathy (see my Day of Wrath to understand the concept of “psychoclasses” and “psychogenesis”, the latter term understood as the development of empathy in the historical record). The article continues:
Empathy exists on a spectrum… The English word empathy is derived from the Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empatheia, meaning “physical affection or passion”).That word derives from ἐν (en, “in, at”) and πάθος (pathos, “passion” or “suffering”). Theodor Lipps adapted the German aesthetic term Einfühlung (“feeling into”) to psychology in 1903, and Edward Titchener translated Einfühlung into English as “empathy” in 1909. In modern Greek εμπάθεια may mean depending on the context, prejudice, malevolence, malice or hatred.
In my post this morning, I alluded to a comment I made yesterday when I learned that my sister had lost her entire inheritance precisely because she is incapable of “reading” other people’s minds. Since it’s an important comment, I think it’s necessary to quote part of it so it appears in an article, not just in the comments section:
Empathy is neither sympathy for a person nor compassion for him or her.
Empathy means unconsciously detecting the vibe of the Other.
We can even have empathy for a serial killer (for example, the black guy in the Netflix series who detected Jeffrey Dahmer’s very negative psychic wavelength and ran away from his flat in time).Genoveva has no empathy for scammers because she doesn’t even have it for her son or her brother (me). Since our mother treated Geno without empathy, she didn’t develop sufficient ego boundaries. With her diffuse ego, she has been unable to detect malice.
It’s a serious mental illness, and it all stems from the massive repression by Genoveva and millions of other humans regarding the mistreatment many of us have suffered.
My autobiographical project, if understood and practised, would cure these psychopathologies through excruciatingly painful introspections and flashbacks into how our parents murdered our souls, like surgery for the mind, but as necessary as removing cholesterol plaques from the coronary arteries during heart surgery.
But this type of literary project—a true surgery of the soul—doesn’t exist in the world except for what people like John Modrow (an American), Benjamin Power (an Englishman) and I have written.
So empathy isn’t bad, nor is an excess of it. From this perspective, there’s no such thing as toxic or ethno-suicidal empathy, as we recently saw Joel Webbon telling Nick Fuentes.
What exists is toxic compassion or ethno-suicidal sympathy for the Other, which on this site we’ve been calling neochristianity in the sense of exponentially exacerbating Christian morality to the point of self-immolation, which is what virtually every Westerner suffers from today.
But sensing the vibe of a friend or a foe—empathy—will always be good, whether to love the former or to be extremely wary of the latter.