The 800 pound gorilla sitting in the corner during any discussion of empathy is the fact that empathy is the emotion that fuels the sadist. Without the ability to derive some emotional feedback from the subject of their action whether an innocent or a masochist the sadist cannot function.
I think that the respondents to that Quora thread overwhelmingly demonstrated their own sadistic streak which of course can't be sated with a psychopath as the emotional feedback isn't really there
Your comment really caught my interest, I’ve reread it several times and I know I will be thinking about this all afternoon.
I’ve always found it puzzling why some people can be so dense as not to see how their insulting suggestions such as preventing a certain group of people from having children when taken to it’s logical conclusion could end up with them as the targeted group.
Many people erroneously include sadists under the psychopathy umbrella and from what I understand while sadists don’t feel remorse or guilt they do have a high sensitivity for detecting others distress and confusion especially when they are the cause of it. They like this. Being that it is in their nature to provoke, instigate or at least take enjoyment from others pain, they are seemingly oblivious to how cruel they really are.
So, well, that’s all I’ve got right now, I will think on this further because it somehow makes sense to me and, at least in part, answers the question of why some folk are so shortsighted.
I’d like to know if you are on Quora, and , of course if I have made any erroneous assumptions in my response to your comment.
Wow, you have talked to some really rude and stupid people. They obviously lack empathy for anyone not like them.
Having empathy SHOULD be a feeling that connects you too someone's pain or sorrow and helps you too put yourself in their place and try to help them. Maybe it's just me but I never realized before that people could choose where their empathy is or is not placed. That was quite an eye opener for me. I'm so sorry people talk to you that way. It's unfortunate that the internet seems to bring the worst out in people. SHAME ON THEM!
I think that fear has taken them over and they are acting out because of it.
Well I guess I should say I hope that's the issue, but again I can hear my son's voice in my head saying I give humans too much credit.
Empathy is suppose to be a tool to benefit others by it's use. Well that's how I see it. They obviously have no clue how to use it.
I can see your thinking here completely though. Wow (shaking my head in disbelief, just wow).
People choose where their empathy is going to go all the time, and they also will use it as a tool against other people. Humans allow too much of their thinking and values to be doled out to an exterior authority, and that's all fine and good when the teachings that they follow lay the building blocks to see everyone as valuable, but that is happening less and less, and a far more nefarious way of seeing others is emerging.
What I hear from people on a regular basis recently definitely has echos from very negative times in history. It would be very unwise to not pay attention.
I agree that people are not changing for the better . In fact they are becoming more selfish and almost childish as far as I can tell and like you said more tribal like.
I see that everyone has value, to someone, we are all human after all. I never did like the clicks or bigotry.
It has seemed to me that for the last 40 yrs or so we are devolving . People look at me like I'm nuts when I say that, but I see the lack of civility and common curtusy everywhere . Don't even let me get started on the political leaders.
We could do so much good for all of humanity if we would just come together. The whole world should be one big tribe of people, as long as people want to be tribal.
There's so much going on in it right now and I just don't get why people want to squabble about nonsense and power. I could go on for days, but no one wants to listen to me rant.
So I know people can be rude and judgemental, I just never thought of it as a tribal thing before.
Together we could save the planet, feed and house everyone and give everyone a decent education, but we'd have to put greed aside for one thing, and more. I better stop.
But I really never thought that empathy was selective before but when you explain it, and from what people do and say, well yeah I guess it is or at least can be.
Thank you for your input here, Sheez. Humanity is reaching out and screaming to be had. Lets do all we can to show others and ourselves how important it is to our well-being! 🌎 🧬 🗺
"It wasn’t fair when you did it either. Unless you want that to be your future, it’s time to come back to a logical way of weighing the world, and leave your emotions at the door."
This is where personal evaluation comes in. You have to decide what right action in in the world. What you are willing to do, and not do, regardless of the circumstances in front of you. It is one thing to believe that you would never support the Holocaust for instance, it is quite another to look at what lead up to it, and the events themselves, and deciding, regardless of who is the target of something like that, I will never be a part of it. It is against what I have decided is right action.
When someone has made a choice before that time arrives, the can more clearly stay by the choice that they have made, despite an emotional desire to do something else. It is one thing to look back and say that something was terrible, and in the instance of the Jews, that they were victims, and how awful it was that they were victimized, it is quite another to live in the propaganda, and social/emotional brainwashing that not only made it possible, but made people eagerly participate.
People can justify horrific things if they allow themselves to be sold on the ideas that are pushing those horrific things. It is a lot easier to condemn people to terrible things when you have already been made to hate them.
No matter what you think of another person, you have to decide ahead of time what you think the right action is in terms of how people are treated. Then you cannot replace that decision with an emotional reasoning why it's okay... this time.
I imagine what I've mentioned really isn't easy for anybody to get who has the natural advantage of experiencing much less emotional intensity than others and so (as a result) finds logic much easier to put into practice - as they wouldn't have the same emotional obstacles that get in the way.
Putting thought into things ahead of time/logic use definitely helps! And I'll certainly use your suggestions to the best of your ability. But I've personally found (even after committing a lot of time/thought to controlling emotional responses) it doesn't always help. :( Strong illogical emotional experiences can still hit from out of the blue at any time (for me anyways) and at such a fast rate I can't always stop myself from saying/doing impulsive things as a result (even when not in my favour).
No matter the skin color, political belief, religion, or lack thereof, brain functioning, etc, no matter how they might be different, none of those differences remove their humanity. It is the removal of humanity that moves people towards a bad outcome.
The first seeds that are planted are the dehumanization of someone. From there things like Unit 731 grow and take root. Don't play into "us versus them". At some point it always turns back on the side that thinks that they have power.
Good that you posted this here as well as on Quora. I had thought little about empathy until you began discussing it there some time ago. It made me realise that I never thought it as an especially useful emotion because my own is is kinda messed up (there are reasons) and inconsistent and erratic. It can be overwhelming or entirely absent, with no obvious pattern. So is a poor prompt for conduct in those situations where empathy is appropriate, or else something that causes me uneccesary pain in situations where it really shouldn't. I had no choice but to 'go cognitive', and it took a while.
Look at our closest living relative. Chimpanzees are known for their lack of restraint in the use of violence. They compete for territory and resources. During the Gonbe chimpanzee war, one troop wiped out another and took all of that territory for itself.
These are the conditions under which both empathy and tribalism evolved in our ancestors. It was useful for our ancestors to have empathy for those who are related or who are part of your tribe and thus useful against the others. On that same token, the desire to destroy the outsiders was useful as it could secure resources for the tribe. And so, both the empathetic and the violent genes were passed on. From the perspective of survival, a tribe should be tolerant enough to trade with other tribes and use them to their advantage, but still intolerant enough to murder them all if there was a benefit in doing so.
Skip forward to today. Our science and our economy are so interconnected that basically all nations and ethnic groups are useful to our ultimate expansion. But we aren't wired for perpetual peace.
The internet was supposed to connect us, but many online spaces serve as echo chambers that amplify tribal fervor. Google and other tech giants send you recommendations based on what you've previously viewed, something that keeps people in their echo chambers.
Extending our identities and our tribe to encompass all of humanity is the only way I see to move past this, and due to the rapid rate of cultural exchange, we've made some progress towards this. There will probably always be an "other," but we can at least move closer to that goal.
There is one genuinely useful aspect of tribalism, that being that it can serve as a motivator to band together and fight back when the other tribe decides come to wipe you out.
Psychopaths are the one group that can never be a threat as a group (to say nothing about them as individuals) as psychopaths lack the emotions necessary for tribalism.
Individually, you are strong (maybe the strongest), but collectively, you are weak. Because you are weak, you are an easy target for those looking for one. You don't even fight back against a collective attack. Well, you Athena, are the only psychopath I've seen fighting back. I suppose that even without a shared identity, you cognitively recognize the threat. And besides, it seems to line up with your interests.
The paradox of intolerance states "if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant." I fear this may come to pass.
Whenever the opposing group specifically wants to eliminate you as a group and is using the levers of power to do so, well, at that point you are no longer required to tolerate them, and should do whatever is necessary to stop them. Though, acting out of emotions that were developed for ancient tribal warfare are not likely to yield the desired results, so this should be done in a more intelligent way. Which unfortunately just isn't what's happening.
Most are quite serious. I have engaged with the people asking the questions in the past, and they not only are serious, feel very justified in their way of thinking.
Open minds, do in fact, Open Doors and give us a better picture of the world we live in. My only regret is that neither I, nor the person I was invested in, knew about psychopathy. Both of us would have benefitted (each other) greatly had we known.
It sort of comes to the Machiavellian question of whether stability is more important that morality in a leader. I think some people would be concerned about the risk of corruption. Assuming a psychopath’s goal was to stay in power, it would theoretically be in their interests to set up a very authoritarian system, because that would help them maintain power.
I suppose that this applies to NTs, too, but I feel like they might be more likely to play by the rules. Is that accurate?
I can’t see any reason a psychopath would want to be a leader, though.
Proper empathy is not a favoured trait in the current social environment. If you try to stay in the middle of debates, and listen to both sides, they both end up hating you. That probably doesn’t bother psychopaths, but it can be quite distressing for NTs.
Psychopaths aren't obsessed with power. That is an ego function. We don't care about it. It can be a helpful means to an end, sure, but power otherwise is nothing but a huge responsibility with no real payoff for one of us.
I see no value in power for the sake of it. When you are in "charge" that's it, that is your whole life. You can't do what you want to do. You have to be responsible for everybody else. You have to make sure everything works. Even if that means that you have to make sure the work that is based on your own ideology, it's still life consuming. What a waste of valuable time where a psychopath could be doing something actually fun.
It baffles how the user somehow assumes they know what other people feel.
My expressions often don't match my feelings. I have dealt with empathetic friends who in problematic situations would side with the person who would show more emotion. In some of those cases, the person who I was having trouble with grew up and admired they were behaving like toxic self-entitled brats. They would put so much pressure on me, because I was trying to express myself rationally and figure out solutions that would work best for both or deny some entitlement of them over my life.
I could be anxious or distressed, I could be sad or emotionally wounded. A lot of times it wasn't until I started to feel tears streaming down my face that they would realise that maybe their emotional empathy wasn't going both sides.
With that input as a kid, I tried to emulate what others were doing and how they expressed emotions, I would read descriptions of which muscles twitched, how their voices changed (try to keep the speech slow when I was trying to express I was sad, giving it some more impulsity to seem more lively when I was somewhat happy). In the moments I knew my expressions didn't communicate my emotions and it was getting me trouble, the "acting" kicked right in. You might imagine it often didn't go as well as I might making it sound because from the moment I would also use my features to communicate the emotion, some would call that move manipulative and deceiving. I attempted really hard to also explain the reason for those types of behaviour but those some would not seem to care.
I am glad I am an adult and have more chances of looking for people who actually take me seriously and I don't fall in the pitfall of despair that was the gap between NTs and I.
A psychologist diagnosed me with high functioning autism when I turned 19. There is probably more to me. I have a lot of maladaptations to undo.
Another thing that is interesting and seldomly mentioned is how having the mechanisms for emotional empathy is a recquirement for sadism or how some helpers prolong the suffering of the victims needlessly so they might feel good about themselves. The book "the dark sides of empathy" is an interesting read for those who might be interested in more. I think Athena has mentioned it a couple of times.
I have found that most people rely heavily on their emotional systems for empathy, and never work to develop their cognitive ones. This leads people to miss very distinct cues from others, because they are not the same as theirs.
A great deal of empathy is a misnomer. It isn't empathy, it is mutual understanding. If the two people involved are fundamentally different, this can not occur, and results in the problems that you speak about above. It can also lead people to miss empathy that is actually present in some people, and it can assume empathy is present when it is not, in other people.
You are completely right in your replies and I agree with every word you said (and it comes from a hyper-empath - or at least a guy who once was an empath).
The thing is, empathy, like cognition, is made up of 3 distinct parts:
1) Affective (emotional) empathy
2) Cognitive (perspective taking) empathy
3) Egocentric empathy/empirical empathy.
Naturally, the if you're a psychopath, you're lacking in the emotional subset, thus, in affective empathy by default.
However, people only need 2 types of empathy in order for the 3rd one to emerge itself, so even a psychopath (with you being an obvious example) can be more empathetic than a hyper-empathetical person who wields only 1 type of empathy (most often it's egocentrical when Neurotypicals and Autism are concerned, but if it's cognitive only, in that case I believe the diagnosis gets a name - narcissistic personality disorder :) I think it's pretty logical because narcissists do not rely on their personal experiences, because their self-esteem is low and they would much rather compare themselves to others, thus, relying on the cognitive empathy instead).
The egocentrical empathy is a given - everyone has that one built in (except the NPD patients who don't rely on it) - It's basically a system of projections based on personal experience. It's the first empathy we develop while growing up.
Next comes the affective - provided that you have neurological circuits for that available - which is basically "feeling" what others feel, and letting that influence how YOU feel. And that is what most of these cases you end up arguing with have developed highly, naively thinking that it is sufficient to be "good"; "empathetic"; or any other BS thrown around in their environments.
And finally, cognitive empathy (it took me 25 years or so to develop this one, even though I've wielded the affective and egocentrical ones pretty much whole life - so I guess it's not that quick to emerge, but emergence is what it eventually does, sooner or later) which enables us to view things from OTHER's perspective (or if you wanna simpligy things, cognitive empathy in theory would be equal to tuning into other person's egocentric empathy, but in practise, we just come nearer and nearer to doing that based on our knowledge of that other person).
And IMO that pretty much covers it all. In the hands of someone like you, I have no doubts, many other things can be inferred from such a point of view.
I'm trying to give you a compliment while at the same time pointing you to the existence of a 3rd variable (just like I did yesterday in a reply about emotions vs logic dichotomy, adding experience to the equation). It's always 3 (when it's not 4 xD) - Tesla wasn't obsessed with that number for no reason.
If you find these replies useful in your thinking, as much as I found your posts useful in mine, we might do well to research into things together sometimes :)
The 800 pound gorilla sitting in the corner during any discussion of empathy is the fact that empathy is the emotion that fuels the sadist. Without the ability to derive some emotional feedback from the subject of their action whether an innocent or a masochist the sadist cannot function.
I think that the respondents to that Quora thread overwhelmingly demonstrated their own sadistic streak which of course can't be sated with a psychopath as the emotional feedback isn't really there
Indeed, quite true
Your comment really caught my interest, I’ve reread it several times and I know I will be thinking about this all afternoon.
I’ve always found it puzzling why some people can be so dense as not to see how their insulting suggestions such as preventing a certain group of people from having children when taken to it’s logical conclusion could end up with them as the targeted group.
Many people erroneously include sadists under the psychopathy umbrella and from what I understand while sadists don’t feel remorse or guilt they do have a high sensitivity for detecting others distress and confusion especially when they are the cause of it. They like this. Being that it is in their nature to provoke, instigate or at least take enjoyment from others pain, they are seemingly oblivious to how cruel they really are.
So, well, that’s all I’ve got right now, I will think on this further because it somehow makes sense to me and, at least in part, answers the question of why some folk are so shortsighted.
I’d like to know if you are on Quora, and , of course if I have made any erroneous assumptions in my response to your comment.
I'm on Quora but mostly just read and research. You pretty much have my take correct here
Wow, you have talked to some really rude and stupid people. They obviously lack empathy for anyone not like them.
Having empathy SHOULD be a feeling that connects you too someone's pain or sorrow and helps you too put yourself in their place and try to help them. Maybe it's just me but I never realized before that people could choose where their empathy is or is not placed. That was quite an eye opener for me. I'm so sorry people talk to you that way. It's unfortunate that the internet seems to bring the worst out in people. SHAME ON THEM!
I think that fear has taken them over and they are acting out because of it.
Well I guess I should say I hope that's the issue, but again I can hear my son's voice in my head saying I give humans too much credit.
Empathy is suppose to be a tool to benefit others by it's use. Well that's how I see it. They obviously have no clue how to use it.
I can see your thinking here completely though. Wow (shaking my head in disbelief, just wow).
People choose where their empathy is going to go all the time, and they also will use it as a tool against other people. Humans allow too much of their thinking and values to be doled out to an exterior authority, and that's all fine and good when the teachings that they follow lay the building blocks to see everyone as valuable, but that is happening less and less, and a far more nefarious way of seeing others is emerging.
What I hear from people on a regular basis recently definitely has echos from very negative times in history. It would be very unwise to not pay attention.
I agree that people are not changing for the better . In fact they are becoming more selfish and almost childish as far as I can tell and like you said more tribal like.
I see that everyone has value, to someone, we are all human after all. I never did like the clicks or bigotry.
It has seemed to me that for the last 40 yrs or so we are devolving . People look at me like I'm nuts when I say that, but I see the lack of civility and common curtusy everywhere . Don't even let me get started on the political leaders.
We could do so much good for all of humanity if we would just come together. The whole world should be one big tribe of people, as long as people want to be tribal.
There's so much going on in it right now and I just don't get why people want to squabble about nonsense and power. I could go on for days, but no one wants to listen to me rant.
So I know people can be rude and judgemental, I just never thought of it as a tribal thing before.
Together we could save the planet, feed and house everyone and give everyone a decent education, but we'd have to put greed aside for one thing, and more. I better stop.
But I really never thought that empathy was selective before but when you explain it, and from what people do and say, well yeah I guess it is or at least can be.
Thank you for your input here, Sheez. Humanity is reaching out and screaming to be had. Lets do all we can to show others and ourselves how important it is to our well-being! 🌎 🧬 🗺
"It wasn’t fair when you did it either. Unless you want that to be your future, it’s time to come back to a logical way of weighing the world, and leave your emotions at the door."
How do you suggest we do this?
This is where personal evaluation comes in. You have to decide what right action in in the world. What you are willing to do, and not do, regardless of the circumstances in front of you. It is one thing to believe that you would never support the Holocaust for instance, it is quite another to look at what lead up to it, and the events themselves, and deciding, regardless of who is the target of something like that, I will never be a part of it. It is against what I have decided is right action.
When someone has made a choice before that time arrives, the can more clearly stay by the choice that they have made, despite an emotional desire to do something else. It is one thing to look back and say that something was terrible, and in the instance of the Jews, that they were victims, and how awful it was that they were victimized, it is quite another to live in the propaganda, and social/emotional brainwashing that not only made it possible, but made people eagerly participate.
People can justify horrific things if they allow themselves to be sold on the ideas that are pushing those horrific things. It is a lot easier to condemn people to terrible things when you have already been made to hate them.
No matter what you think of another person, you have to decide ahead of time what you think the right action is in terms of how people are treated. Then you cannot replace that decision with an emotional reasoning why it's okay... this time.
I imagine what I've mentioned really isn't easy for anybody to get who has the natural advantage of experiencing much less emotional intensity than others and so (as a result) finds logic much easier to put into practice - as they wouldn't have the same emotional obstacles that get in the way.
Putting thought into things ahead of time/logic use definitely helps! And I'll certainly use your suggestions to the best of your ability. But I've personally found (even after committing a lot of time/thought to controlling emotional responses) it doesn't always help. :( Strong illogical emotional experiences can still hit from out of the blue at any time (for me anyways) and at such a fast rate I can't always stop myself from saying/doing impulsive things as a result (even when not in my favour).
Also, as my Significant Other well articulated.
No matter the skin color, political belief, religion, or lack thereof, brain functioning, etc, no matter how they might be different, none of those differences remove their humanity. It is the removal of humanity that moves people towards a bad outcome.
The first seeds that are planted are the dehumanization of someone. From there things like Unit 731 grow and take root. Don't play into "us versus them". At some point it always turns back on the side that thinks that they have power.
In Terry Practhett's Discworld books there is this - "Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things."
A very true statement
Good that you posted this here as well as on Quora. I had thought little about empathy until you began discussing it there some time ago. It made me realise that I never thought it as an especially useful emotion because my own is is kinda messed up (there are reasons) and inconsistent and erratic. It can be overwhelming or entirely absent, with no obvious pattern. So is a poor prompt for conduct in those situations where empathy is appropriate, or else something that causes me uneccesary pain in situations where it really shouldn't. I had no choice but to 'go cognitive', and it took a while.
Look at our closest living relative. Chimpanzees are known for their lack of restraint in the use of violence. They compete for territory and resources. During the Gonbe chimpanzee war, one troop wiped out another and took all of that territory for itself.
These are the conditions under which both empathy and tribalism evolved in our ancestors. It was useful for our ancestors to have empathy for those who are related or who are part of your tribe and thus useful against the others. On that same token, the desire to destroy the outsiders was useful as it could secure resources for the tribe. And so, both the empathetic and the violent genes were passed on. From the perspective of survival, a tribe should be tolerant enough to trade with other tribes and use them to their advantage, but still intolerant enough to murder them all if there was a benefit in doing so.
Skip forward to today. Our science and our economy are so interconnected that basically all nations and ethnic groups are useful to our ultimate expansion. But we aren't wired for perpetual peace.
The internet was supposed to connect us, but many online spaces serve as echo chambers that amplify tribal fervor. Google and other tech giants send you recommendations based on what you've previously viewed, something that keeps people in their echo chambers.
Extending our identities and our tribe to encompass all of humanity is the only way I see to move past this, and due to the rapid rate of cultural exchange, we've made some progress towards this. There will probably always be an "other," but we can at least move closer to that goal.
There is one genuinely useful aspect of tribalism, that being that it can serve as a motivator to band together and fight back when the other tribe decides come to wipe you out.
Psychopaths are the one group that can never be a threat as a group (to say nothing about them as individuals) as psychopaths lack the emotions necessary for tribalism.
Individually, you are strong (maybe the strongest), but collectively, you are weak. Because you are weak, you are an easy target for those looking for one. You don't even fight back against a collective attack. Well, you Athena, are the only psychopath I've seen fighting back. I suppose that even without a shared identity, you cognitively recognize the threat. And besides, it seems to line up with your interests.
The paradox of intolerance states "if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant." I fear this may come to pass.
Whenever the opposing group specifically wants to eliminate you as a group and is using the levers of power to do so, well, at that point you are no longer required to tolerate them, and should do whatever is necessary to stop them. Though, acting out of emotions that were developed for ancient tribal warfare are not likely to yield the desired results, so this should be done in a more intelligent way. Which unfortunately just isn't what's happening.
What an excellent comment. I agree with you.
A lot of those questions and comments can’t be serious, right? A lot of it seems like trolling
Most are quite serious. I have engaged with the people asking the questions in the past, and they not only are serious, feel very justified in their way of thinking.
Open minds, do in fact, Open Doors and give us a better picture of the world we live in. My only regret is that neither I, nor the person I was invested in, knew about psychopathy. Both of us would have benefitted (each other) greatly had we known.
You do as well as you can with the tools that you have. When you have better tools, you do even better.
It sort of comes to the Machiavellian question of whether stability is more important that morality in a leader. I think some people would be concerned about the risk of corruption. Assuming a psychopath’s goal was to stay in power, it would theoretically be in their interests to set up a very authoritarian system, because that would help them maintain power.
I suppose that this applies to NTs, too, but I feel like they might be more likely to play by the rules. Is that accurate?
I can’t see any reason a psychopath would want to be a leader, though.
Proper empathy is not a favoured trait in the current social environment. If you try to stay in the middle of debates, and listen to both sides, they both end up hating you. That probably doesn’t bother psychopaths, but it can be quite distressing for NTs.
Psychopaths aren't obsessed with power. That is an ego function. We don't care about it. It can be a helpful means to an end, sure, but power otherwise is nothing but a huge responsibility with no real payoff for one of us.
I see no value in power for the sake of it. When you are in "charge" that's it, that is your whole life. You can't do what you want to do. You have to be responsible for everybody else. You have to make sure everything works. Even if that means that you have to make sure the work that is based on your own ideology, it's still life consuming. What a waste of valuable time where a psychopath could be doing something actually fun.
That makes sense.
Like I said, I can’t see much reason for a psychopath to want to be a leader.
It baffles how the user somehow assumes they know what other people feel.
My expressions often don't match my feelings. I have dealt with empathetic friends who in problematic situations would side with the person who would show more emotion. In some of those cases, the person who I was having trouble with grew up and admired they were behaving like toxic self-entitled brats. They would put so much pressure on me, because I was trying to express myself rationally and figure out solutions that would work best for both or deny some entitlement of them over my life.
I could be anxious or distressed, I could be sad or emotionally wounded. A lot of times it wasn't until I started to feel tears streaming down my face that they would realise that maybe their emotional empathy wasn't going both sides.
With that input as a kid, I tried to emulate what others were doing and how they expressed emotions, I would read descriptions of which muscles twitched, how their voices changed (try to keep the speech slow when I was trying to express I was sad, giving it some more impulsity to seem more lively when I was somewhat happy). In the moments I knew my expressions didn't communicate my emotions and it was getting me trouble, the "acting" kicked right in. You might imagine it often didn't go as well as I might making it sound because from the moment I would also use my features to communicate the emotion, some would call that move manipulative and deceiving. I attempted really hard to also explain the reason for those types of behaviour but those some would not seem to care.
I am glad I am an adult and have more chances of looking for people who actually take me seriously and I don't fall in the pitfall of despair that was the gap between NTs and I.
A psychologist diagnosed me with high functioning autism when I turned 19. There is probably more to me. I have a lot of maladaptations to undo.
Another thing that is interesting and seldomly mentioned is how having the mechanisms for emotional empathy is a recquirement for sadism or how some helpers prolong the suffering of the victims needlessly so they might feel good about themselves. The book "the dark sides of empathy" is an interesting read for those who might be interested in more. I think Athena has mentioned it a couple of times.
I have found that most people rely heavily on their emotional systems for empathy, and never work to develop their cognitive ones. This leads people to miss very distinct cues from others, because they are not the same as theirs.
A great deal of empathy is a misnomer. It isn't empathy, it is mutual understanding. If the two people involved are fundamentally different, this can not occur, and results in the problems that you speak about above. It can also lead people to miss empathy that is actually present in some people, and it can assume empathy is present when it is not, in other people.
*its
Would you mind pointing out where the correction that needs to be made is located in the post? It would be very helpful, thank you.
The title.
Thank you kindly. I fixed it.
You are completely right in your replies and I agree with every word you said (and it comes from a hyper-empath - or at least a guy who once was an empath).
The thing is, empathy, like cognition, is made up of 3 distinct parts:
1) Affective (emotional) empathy
2) Cognitive (perspective taking) empathy
3) Egocentric empathy/empirical empathy.
Naturally, the if you're a psychopath, you're lacking in the emotional subset, thus, in affective empathy by default.
However, people only need 2 types of empathy in order for the 3rd one to emerge itself, so even a psychopath (with you being an obvious example) can be more empathetic than a hyper-empathetical person who wields only 1 type of empathy (most often it's egocentrical when Neurotypicals and Autism are concerned, but if it's cognitive only, in that case I believe the diagnosis gets a name - narcissistic personality disorder :) I think it's pretty logical because narcissists do not rely on their personal experiences, because their self-esteem is low and they would much rather compare themselves to others, thus, relying on the cognitive empathy instead).
The egocentrical empathy is a given - everyone has that one built in (except the NPD patients who don't rely on it) - It's basically a system of projections based on personal experience. It's the first empathy we develop while growing up.
Next comes the affective - provided that you have neurological circuits for that available - which is basically "feeling" what others feel, and letting that influence how YOU feel. And that is what most of these cases you end up arguing with have developed highly, naively thinking that it is sufficient to be "good"; "empathetic"; or any other BS thrown around in their environments.
And finally, cognitive empathy (it took me 25 years or so to develop this one, even though I've wielded the affective and egocentrical ones pretty much whole life - so I guess it's not that quick to emerge, but emergence is what it eventually does, sooner or later) which enables us to view things from OTHER's perspective (or if you wanna simpligy things, cognitive empathy in theory would be equal to tuning into other person's egocentric empathy, but in practise, we just come nearer and nearer to doing that based on our knowledge of that other person).
And IMO that pretty much covers it all. In the hands of someone like you, I have no doubts, many other things can be inferred from such a point of view.
I'm trying to give you a compliment while at the same time pointing you to the existence of a 3rd variable (just like I did yesterday in a reply about emotions vs logic dichotomy, adding experience to the equation). It's always 3 (when it's not 4 xD) - Tesla wasn't obsessed with that number for no reason.
If you find these replies useful in your thinking, as much as I found your posts useful in mine, we might do well to research into things together sometimes :)
Oh this should be interesting