EMPATHY

#empathy #psychology #ethics #morality

“I wish I was different” she said.

“Different how?” he asked.

“Different enough to not wish I was different” he said.

Empathy is not a virtue, it’s a squatter. It moves in uninvited, rearranges the furniture of your mind, and floods the place with other people’s grief. I feel things that aren’t mine like I’ve stolen them but can’t give them back. I apologise to spiders, mourn characters in adverts, and once cried over a broken mug because it was part of a set. Empathy doesn’t elevate, it infects. The worst part? No one knows. They just think I’m moody. So no, I don’t want to hear about your bad day. But I will, and I’ll carry it until it breaks something.

I thought empathy was common, a presumed feature of humanity, and unlike most human features such as belly buttons and feet hair, empathy was a good one. I, naively perhaps, operated under the belief that people acted with kindness because they felt something, not because they were mimicking a moral mime act. But apparently, most people don’t feel empathy at all, they simply perform it because society holds a gun to their head labelled “normal.”

The Enlightenment, a period when powdered wigs were more common than clean water, dared to ask: “Why do we care?” David Hume, looking like a man who was always halfway through a sigh, suggested that morality stems not from logic but sentiment. “Reason is,” he said, “and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” In other words, we don’t help old ladies cross the street because we’ve calculated the moral worth, we do it because it feels right.

Adam Smith, who most know as the father of capitalism and not as the man who gave empathy its philosophical wings, introduced the idea of the “Impartial Spectator”, a kind of ghostly audience in our heads who judges our every act. Morality, to him, was theatre, and empathy – the audience’s awkward applause.

Even Kant, that stiff-backed moral puritan, tried to scrub the emotions out of ethics like a nun bleaching a crime scene. He insisted only actions done from duty, not feelings, had moral worth. Feeling bad about kicking a cat was not enough; you needed to know it was wrong through reason.

But here lies the bitter truth: many people behave decently not because they feel deeply, but because they’ve been socially programmed to, like dogs trained not to pee on carpets, not because they understand hygiene, but because they fear the slipper. Empathy, then, might be more akin to theatre than instinct, internalised performances echoing what society expects, not what the soul necessarily emits.

Take, for instance, a door. In most instances, if someone walks ahead of you through one, they’ll hold it open, not always, but mostly. It’s part of the social contract, like pretending to care how someone’s weekend was. But replace the door with a junction, and the person with a car, and suddenly that mask slips fast. Now boxed in behind metal and glass, their humanity is left in the glove compartment. That simple gesture of letting another car out? Vanished. Because behind the wheel, there is no audience, no theatre, just raw, unfiltered selfishness on four wheels, with all the rationality of a shopping trolley.

“Why are you crying?” she asked.

“Because I have water in my eyes” he said.

“Why have you got water in your eyes?” she asked.

“Because I’m crying” he said.

The Enlightenment, in all its powdered glory, exposed this. Social norms, not sentiment alone, shaped ethics. People followed moral rules the way some people follow cooking instructions, not because they understand them, but because they fear the consequences of improvisation.

So here I sit, still draped in the foolish comfort of my own deluded decency, wondering if I’m the madman for feeling when so many simply rehearse. Like the last romantic in a brothel reading poetry aloud, hoping the moaning is from pathos, not the plumbing.

But maybe that’s the point, maybe the performance is all we’ve got. Perhaps empathy is like a mirror, not everyone has one, but they’ll pretend they do just to stop the conversation turning awkward, and if you can fake empathy well enough, does it matter whether you feel it?

As Hume might have said, with one brow raised and a whisky in hand, perhaps not…

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