Teaching Empathy

When I was a lot younger, a friend of mine once told me, “You’re not merely someone who crosses boundaries; you take the goal posts and run away with them.” It was said in a joking capacity — I think — over beers, but it was still one of those things that make you wonder how much truth there was in the statement.

As far as I know, I have always been an abstract thinker in an ironic kinda way. Ironic because I never had a special interest in theory. Theory, from my perspective, might as well not exist if it didn’t apply to something tangible. Something that I could relate to. So I was a very practical thinker, because I only thought about the things that related to me, but at the same time I would almost overburden those things with different perspectives of thought, different ways that I could connect them to gain new insight.

For the longest time, the concept of feelings was an intangible one to me. I couldn’t see them, or measure them, or even really reason about them. They might as well not have existed, and I deemed them unworthy of thought.

In hindsight, I can see rather clearly how the combination of those biases behind my own thought caused an attitude that was horribly self-centred and oppressive to others. Self-centred because I only cared about what was tangible to me, and even when I thought to consider someone else’s perspective, I just assumed they ought to think just like me. Oppressive because as I ignored my own emotions, so too didn’t I consider the emotions of others. I didn’t respect boundaries because in my perspective, emotional boundaries didn’t exist. I was simply too focused on intellectual boundaries and only respected those that could push back on such a level.

Looking back at this, I realise it almost sounds like someone who is — or was — quite on the spectrum, but I don’t think there was anything physically wrong with me. It was simply how I was educated. Or rather, how I was not educated. In my family, men didn’t talk about feelings. Feelings were those pesky things that women dealt with, and look at them, it only made them irrational!

Empathy is not merely an innate sense of compassion, it’s also a learned skill. It may come naturally to some, but others may suppress it, as I did for a long time. But 15 years ago I suffered an immense psychosis. I think I only really learned to become open to the notion of empathy after that, because I was effectively forced to admit that my old ways of thinking weren’t working out for me, and I was forced to listen to my feelings, and I was forced to come to terms with who I am.

Since then I discovered that feelings can very much be reasoned with. It was one of the things that made me interested in becoming a writer of fiction. I started to love imagining characters whose actions are driven by feelings and needs. Writing and exploring how those motivations and desires worked out for them was a great practice in empathy for me, and still is.

Can you “cure” an autistic person by rationally teaching the value of empathy? Can you “cure” depression by rationally and emphatically teaching the value of positive thinking? I don’t know if it’s possible, although I’m willing to believe it is. I don’t really want to theorise further in this direction out of respect for those suffering from mental illness. I know first hand how horrible the experience is, and even if it’s true at some abstract level, you cannot force someone to see the truth of it. If it’s true at all, it’s only true if a patient is willing to believe it. I believe in free will, and I believe it’s a choice available to all of us. But I also believe that some may be too traumatised to see it. You cannot force a traumatised person into seeing anything they don’t want to see. Trauma is rooted in fear — next to love the strongest of human emotions — and as H.P. Lovecraft eloquently put it: The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

We all have free will, and we can all make our own choices. But we don’t know how those choices will play out and that can terrify us. And if you’ve been burned too many times, of course you don’t want to see a rational explanation that tells you to try something new.

The cure is love, and understanding, and empathy. To respect people enough so that they feel safe. In safety we confide. And if we feel safe and supported, we may dare take a chance. I bet psychologists already know this, and I’m not really telling anything new here. They can probably even tell me a great deal of nuance that I’m neglecting to include. Because do you see what I did there? I said I didn’t want to theorise over the backs of mental health patients, yet I did it anyway. Maybe I felt entitled, because I was one of them. And because I was one of them it had become a tangible thing to me. So I did that thing where I put my overburdening sense of abstract thought into it and found myself a solution. It worked for me, so I see value in describing it, so hopefully others can make it work for them too.

But one thing I do know: In doing so, I have a knack for crossing boundaries. I don’t care if they’re intellectual boundaries, personal boundaries, or psychological boundaries. I will find a way to take their very definitions and use them in a way that works for me. I don’t even see the malice in it, because I don’t think I have any malicious intent behind it. But I do know that if I’m not careful, I still have this capacity for oppressive behaviour in me. I believe in free will, so if I will it, I can choose oppression. There’s a dangerous capacity for corruption in me, although I don’t believe it’s unique to me. That’s why I’ve decided a long time ago that I must anchor myself in intellectual honesty, because if I cannot be honest and consistent, all bets are off. But it took me a long time to realise that even intellectual honesty is not enough. Because it doesn’t matter how much you believe that you’re being intellectually honest, a single honest intellectual mistake can undermine your entire ethos. That’s why we need to listen to reason and emotion. And also why we need to listen to others as well as ourselves. And that’s why I think establishing the Philosophy of Balance is a good thing, because it’s my attempt to give moral guidance, through both rational as well as empathic grounding. The philosophy is rooted in the deepest pits of metaphysics and scales all the way up to enlightened views on society.

And it’s been kind of a hard road for me to discover all these lessons. So it still baffles me that as a society we don’t see the value in guiding people along this path. I think it’s partly again a sense of trauma, a leftover of the rigidness from when religion prescribed our thinking. The rigidness that we struggled to get away from. We don’t want to repeat our past mistakes, so we don’t want to prescribe people what they must believe.

And that’s fair, I don’t want to prescribe people what they must believe either. The Philosophy of Balance is a statement against extremism, against corruption, and against bigotry. But it’s not a statement that tells you what to believe. I offer you my perspective and I hope you take away the parts that resonate with you. But I will not force you to take away anything. I know that I cannot, because to presume otherwise would be a betrayal of my respect for your free will.

I merely want to make people think. So they can learn to ask the right questions. So that they can find their ideas of truth.

And that’s something I believe we should embed in our education. In schools. Everyone should follow classes in philosophy. I would never presume to prescribe the Philosophy of Balance. But we need more philosophy in general. So that we learn to ask the right questions.

We all ask ourselves these questions anyway. As kids we must, in order to make sense of the world. We all find our subjective truths. But it’s all too easy to develop an incomplete understanding. One with blind spots, for empathy or boundaries, or even for objective truth altogether. We need to question our own understanding. And it’s really best we do this before we solidify into adulthood.

What we need is an education system that guides us into open-mindedness and leaves us with an understanding of the value of respect and empathy.