What’s going to need to be done to improve this situation is deeply annoying to me (because I have to admit that I often sneakily enjoy watching the faces of the cruel and uncaring get eaten). And I’m sure others will share my annoyance. But when these people fall, and realize they’ve fallen… if the rest of us ever want such folks’ original behavior to change—to have a chance to shift toward something less toxic—somebody has to be there to catch them.
This approach has at least a chance of making meaningful change. And some people on the Other Side know this, and hate it… seeing it as a way they’ll lose power. They betray their true motivations by trying to discredit empathy and compassion—by characterizing them as weakness. And the language they use, trying to be clever, csn accidentally be most revealing.
“The ‘empathy exploit,’” Musk called it the other day. As if the manifestation of understanding someone else’s trouble, and feeling/expressing compassion for it, was somehow unfair, like using a cheat code in a game to get an unearned advantage. That’s the level such people are operating on: that the only thing that matters is winning the game—whatever they’ve decided the current game is—and (from their POV) fuck whatever human suffering’s being experienced on the other side. If those people weren’t weak, and losers, they wouldn’t be suffering, right?
(exasperated sigh) I know which side of this argument I prefer to come down on, even though it’s gonna really annoy me, sometimes, for years to come. Somebody in the room has to swallow her grim amusement and, when confronted by one of these people, move through into a mode that has a chance to make someone’s life less painful.
(shrug) Can’t be helped. Might as well get on with it, day by day: decreasing local entropy by increments…
Sometimes it’s all one can do. But it makes a difference.