Empathy and Performativity: Breaking out of The Ultimate Vicious Circle

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To know that someone has suffered should be enough to move us to take action. The only solution is for people to start treating empathy as an essential part of our makeup, rather than an optional and quirky personality trait.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

We cannot automatically empathize with people unless we have shared experiences with them. This is understandable, and community formation around those shared experiences has been the building block of our civilizations.

BUT we also have the ability to EXTEND that empathy when we get to know of other peoples' experiences. It has to be explained for individual brains to get it - but the good news is, today, more than ever, volumes of that experience is available online.

That's why there's no longer any excuse for not empathizing, or refusing to empathize - more and more people are out here describing their day-to-day difficulties, how policies affect them, what abuse or financial restrictions stand in their way.

More than ever, abstract words like ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and casteism are given flesh and blood application. We are given the chance to understand what someone else's life looks like, empathize with it, and adjust our own views to accommodate their needs.

Unfortunately, this also requires that people who have experienced darkness and difficulty PERFORM their struggles for those of us who do not have that shared experience. Their accounts should be graphic and filled with horror, the better to move us.

What's even worse is that those of us who face fewer difficulties than others demand, in our arrogance, that no space be made for anyone who is different. We refuse to empathize, refuse to be even slightly inconvenienced, even if it would save someone else's life.

The more arrogant and wilfully blind we are, the more marginalized people need to perform their distress to touch us. This is cruelty, plain and simple. We do not need to hear in graphic detail how someone has suffered to understand that they have.

To know that someone has suffered should be enough to move us to take action. This is fvcking tragic and the only solution is for people to start treating empathy as an essential part of our makeup, rather than an optional and quirky personality trait.

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