I’ve written extensively in this space about the ways in which empathy gets twisted and misused. That misuse often leads people to abandon empathy altogether. I’m staunchly pro-empathy. The majority of what I’ve discussed is how people misunderstand empathy for a sort of permissiveness and lack of boundaries.
Today I want to focus on something different. As consistent readers will also have noted, I am on a bit of a “masculinity” or male identity jam right now. One of the things I’m arguing for passionately is more empathy for men, writ large, in the world. I want to talk about a barrier that I am running into and suggest that the barrier is in everyone’s best interest to remove.
Victim/oppressor Model
Right now, across all political ideologies, one of the ways of hardening and retrenching your political beliefs is to set up “your side” as a victim of the “other” side, which is oppressive. Depending on your persuasion, you are most likely to believe that your side is truly the victimized party and the other side is the oppressor.
Conversely, you tend to think the opposite of your opposition. Their victimhood is “fake” and imagined, and they are being manipulative in bringing it up in order to persuade people emotionally.
When I suggest that perhaps there should be more empathy for the lived experience of men, I often run into people who scoff at the notion. Why? Because, they answer, we live in a patriarchy. Men ARE the oppressors. Some may concede that life as a man (particularly as a white man) has some difficulties, they also maintain that those difficulties pale in comparison to whatever other group you want to compare them to.
And thus we enter the victimhood contest. All of a sudden, the victim/oppressor model categorizes any situation into a contest of victimhood. Who is suffering the most oppression. That is who is deserving of empathy. No empathy for other parties.
I think that this construction does more to reinforce an unequal, divided status quo than most people realize. I will at this point strenuously interject that I don’t deny that any of these situations are true. When I look at my profession, one that is overwhelmingly staffed by middle aged white guys, I know what the rankings are. What I do want to suggest that is denying empathy to any other group is a recipe for not changing that.
Frames
I’ve talked before about framing. One of the core concepts of Positive Psychology is narratives. The story you are telling yourself and others about what is going on is an inextricable element of leading a good and happy life.
To that end, it is possible to frame any struggle empathetically or non-empathetically. I think a core part of the struggle the overwhelming majority of people find themselves in is that we have massive inequities culturally. I’m not such bleeding heart that I don’t think some people should have more money than others or deserve more success. I just don’t also believe that there are people out there who are really doing work millions of times more valuable than others.
Just look at our biology, and tell me some instances where there are people with biological differences that are even hundreds of times the magnitude of an “average” person. The tallest person in the world is not even double the height of an average person.
The only way those massive inequities are justified is through a complete lack of empathy. You have to have drain the narrative of empathy so severely to be able to say that yes, you the CEO deserve 300 times the average worker in your company. Or that only a select few (mostly white men, people of “my” tribe) get to have insane wealth and everyone else has to work like a dog to survive.
I guess the final point I’m getting to is a simple one of life. Two wrongs do no make a right. Just because someone is ahead of you in the matrix of oppression, does not mean you are entitled to lack empathy for them. While you may feel exasperated by the lack of change or empathy you are receiving, that does not mean it is a good idea to pass on that lack of empathy.
What I find in the world as a middle aged white guy is that the spaces where there is real empathy for my lived experience are mostly toxic, manosphere or manosphere adjacent spaces that offer me empathy and deny it to pretty much everyone else. I can see why this is winning over men in terrifying numbers. What I’d like to talk everyone else into is to enter this influence game. Let’s fight for empathy, for everyone, regardless of who they are or even what they’ve done.
I say fight for it because it’s truly the only to stop feeding the destructive cycle that I think many of us are witnessing.