A Cambridge professor, Simon Baron-Cohen, has written Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty. In this review, the author explains the professor’s ideas.
Read Why a lack of empathy is the root of all evil, on Independent.co.uk.
Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader.
Interesting article but empathy starved seems a little bit light weight fodder from my experience.
I’d like to read the book. I think there is a spiritual context to all humans….good vs. evil….if you will.
Humans are also “herd” animals and I think we are programmed to be suspicious of “outsiders” (there’s been some recent experiments that were interesting with monkeys showing the anxiety etc and behaviors when faced with other monkeys they didn’t know) and in an evolutionary aspect, it is a good idea to NOT trust someone you don’t know well….but the “us versus them” thinking of large political groups, like the Nazis convincing the Germans that the Jews were responsible for all the evils of their economy etc. so therefore it was OK to take their property and to “dispose” of them as undesirables….China and Stalin also “dehumanized” large segments of the population politically and then disposed of them…. and all the other genocides that are going on or have gone on, and the 9/11 incident with the “religious wars” that are going on today–add in the political/power/money motives for the people who “lead” these EVIL actions on the GLOBAL scale or the INDIVIDUAL scale and you have the “history of the earth” as it has always been and I am assuming always will be.
I actually would like to read this book and see about his 6 levels of empathy, and his zero + and zero – are concepts that are interesting as well.
The article does underscore though, what I think is important, With or without empathy, or how much or how little, we still have CHOICES and with choices come responsibility, and with responsibility comes accountability.
Thanks for sharing this article, Donna. Very thought provoking and interesting information on our healing journey which I believe is as much a spiritual journey as an emotional and mental one.
It does sound like a good book, with lots of interesting information. What doesn’t seem to be addressed though, is the DESIRE to harm others. Lack of empathy would seem to just mean the inability to see others as human beings, but why would that initiate a DESIRE to harm others, the way sociopaths do?
I posted this article because it discusses concepts that we are interested in. However, Dr. Liane Leedom contends that the lack of empathy by itself does not explain sociopathic (evil) behavior. The real culprit is out-of-control dominance motivation, i.e., the desire to harm others.
There is a BIG Difference between EMPATHY and COMPASSION.
Some Psychopaths . . have tons of EMPATHY.
The SADISTIC psychopaths, KNOW VERY WELL what their victim is feeling, and use it to maximally hurt their victim!
So yes, Psychopaths can have EMPATHY, and the successfully sadistic psychopaths have it in spades!
What Psychopaths are lacking is COMPASSION. They KNOW they hurt, abused, degraded, tortured etc. their victim..and either they:
1) DON’T CARE
or
2) ARE HAPPY ABOUT IT (in the case of sadists)
Thanks Donna, for posting it. It’s very interesting.
So lack of empathy is one thing, need for control/dominance is another thing. But even that doesn’t explain the need to see PAIN. They go out of their way to maximize pain. This SADISM, is what is hard to understand.
My own spath told me that he liked to make people really happy so that when they fall, they will have further to go and their pain will feel that much worse.
He loved to go to casinos to watch people lose large amounts of money and he imagined that they would go out and kill themselves in despair. He loved despair.
What’s with that? Is it addiction to drama? I know there is a huge envy connection, but still hard to grasp this hunger for other peoples’ pain.
Donna I agree with Liane’s ideas on this, but in order (I think) to want that OUT OF CONTROL DOMINANCE if you had any ” “effective” level of EMPATHY for the party you were controlling or trying to, or punishing because it wouldn’t be controlled, then you could not HURT IT the way you would do so.
You couldn’t dehumanize it/them to the extent of genocide for example…or murder…or torture.
So it is a case maybe of which came first, the chicken or the egg, the lack of empathy for the victim, or the NEED TO CONTROL AND DOMINATE? I think they are so close to hand in hand that it is very difficult to say does one lead to the other, or are they the flip sides of the SAME COIN?
When I train an animal I want to dominate it, to control it, but because I have empathy for that animal as a living being, I would never use a training method that would cause it injury or pain.
I have debated with our friend BloggerT even about “dehumanizing” the psychopaths….and failing to see that though they are SERIOUSLY FLAWED and dangerous, they ARE human…and sometimes that is difficult to hold on to that concept. It is difficult to have empathy for those that have hurt us, but if we lose our own empathy where does that leave us. If we justify vengeful or hateful or mean behavior in ourselves because the person we did it to was a “psychopath” are we any better than those who justify their behavior toward others by reason of “Jews are bad” or “black is bad” or “white is bad?”
Not that I mean we should “embrace” a psychopath or someone high in psychopathic traits or pity them to the point that we allow their behavior to harm others, they have the ABILITY if not the willingness to control their behavior so they must be held accountable for that behavior and the consequences of that behavior. We must protect ourselves from those people who lack empathy…the same way we would protect ourselves from someone who carried a lethal and contagious disease. Not because that person with the disease isn’t “human” but because the consequences to ourselves would be detrimental to associate closely with them and “catch” the disease.
Even if the person with the “deadly disease” was someone we loved, we could not associate with them without risking our very survival. The same with the psychopath….we can’t associate with them safely. Ones who are a danger to others should, like “Typhoid Mary,” be confined for the good of the public. Mary knew she was contagious but she kept on taking jobs in food service and wouldn’t stop infecting others as a CARRIER of typhoid which is/was a deadly disease…so she was eventually locked up for the public good. Psychopaths in some cases should be locked up for the public good as well when they commit violent and harmful and illegal acts….but in no case is it safe to associate with them intimately….but I think we can’t “dehumanize” them either without risk to our own spiritual and emotional selves. It is a fine line to walk that “tight rope” from having empathy for ANY human who is so lacking in the spiritual and emotional aspects that make us “more human” than animal, but at the same time…we cannot allow that dangerous person to harm us. To root out the bitterness we naturally and normally feel toward someone who has harmed us with their desire to control or destroy us.
I think that Jesus’ command to “pray for those that despitefully use you” wasn’t so much directed at helping the abuser as helping the abused to root out the deep bitterness that is a normal aspect of being abused, but in the end is more harmful to us spiritually and emotionally and “rents out space” for those people in our heads and our hearts.
Accepting that these people are TOXIC to us, dangerous to us, and that we must stay away from them (no contact) as much as possible, as well as not becoming and staying bitter and vengeful ourselves, while accepting that these people who behave this way are flawed, but human, and ARE RESPONSIBLE and ACCOUNTABLE for their actions. We are NOT responsible for how they treated us in the past, we are however responsible for ALLOWING them to treat us badly in the present or the future.
Thank you Donna for recognizing that this healing journey post-psychopath is not only a mental and physical healing, but a spiritual one as well. God bless you and your efforts to help others in their healing.
Sarah, we posted over each other….I like your concepts of the empathy vs compassion….and I see that it in a way depends on how you “define” empathy…is it just understanding how the other feels or is it CARING how the other feels.
In some cases, I think the psychopaths can “read” the feelings of others, but they can’t actually ‘feel” it the way others do, or take those feelings and internalize them. Is that how we learn compassion, is feeling those feelings and then internalizing them?
I guess some of these questions are what philosophers and theologians have asked for centuries.
This is an interesting thread.
never saw my military xhub as out to hurt me. I never thought it was deliberate. I never thought he was particularly calculating, and I never felt targeted. I do believe he was an absolute narcissist and he hurt me as a consequence of his total self-centeredness, and lack of empathy.
I beieve he was trying to find love, and thought he had in me.
I think, later, he realized that intimacy and marriage weren’t all they were cracked up to be, and because of his own issues, he became contemptious, and distant, reoccupied and all the rest of it.
Likewise the spath, in so far as I don’t think he has any awareness that he targets victims.
I think he knows he wants to find a nice woman with a house and a car and fall in love.
Of course, it’s spathological, and it causes pain, but I don’t think causing pain is his goal, just an inevitable outcome of his
entitlement and irresponsibility.
The exceptin to this is his mind games. Those ARE DELIBERATE and planed out meticuliously. However, I think he has very little self-awareness about anything he does.
I think that they were both driven by disorder, but the underlying human motivations were a desire to be loved.
I don’t think that a desire to cause pain is a necissary componant of spathology. I don’t think all spaths desire to cause pain….they just do.
That’s just my opinion, at this time.
Yeah, the dehumanizing thing bothers me , too. I undersand the reasons why it comforts us to do it, but I think it’s spiritually dangerous. Remember dehumanization was the first step in the process of the annialation of the jews during the holocaust. All Hitler hd to do was promote all kinds of propaganda that depicted jews as less than human, then take it one step furthar and call them vermin, and the German people fell right in line.
There is a potential for evil in everybody, and until eople recognize the evil in themselves there will always be scape-goats.
Now, I’m ot excusing the psychopaths, but I don’t want to be guilty of the same things I accuse them of: dominance needs that hurt others, lack of empathy, objectification. My spiritual health depends on my ability to have empathy.
I seek to understand the disorder. Iwish there was a definitive answer to what causes it so we cold have a fail safe way of preventing it.