Empathy and compassion: Difference between revisions

Empathy is the impulse that makes you cry at ''Love Actually'', even while you see how cynically your emotions are being manipulated and how empty the film is.<ref>Purely hypothetical example. Totally.</ref> It doesn’t come from a rational place: it is not the output of a deliberative function.  

Now, we can all have have doubts about homo sapiens’ capacity for logic at the best of times, but when you act based on ''empathy'' you are not even ''trying'' to be rational.

We like to think our leaders should be logical: slow, rather than fast to react, considerate of all positions and constituencies.  

Being ''instinctively'' empathetic is not necessarily fair, equitable or just. It comes from the monkey brain. It favours kin, familiarity, self-image and reinforces our prevailing values and worldview. It shoots without asking questions.

To be empathetic is to walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins, to live her [[lived experience]]; to see the world from her [[standpoint]]. It is to ''take sides. ''This is something to value in your own mum. and the family dog, not in a leader.  

Leaders have to be independent, to have no interest in the matter, and recuse herself when she does. Leaders need sometimes to make decisions their subordinates might not like, and sometimes to arbitrate — to settle disputes between subordinates that at least one of them definitely will not like.

In our postmodern, morally relativistic times, the opportunities for leaders to take sides and get away with it — where there is a consensus good guy against an old school Bond villain antagonist — are rare indeed.  Jacinda Arden who branded herself an empathetic leader had a couple of rare opportunities with unexpected white supremacist terrorism, and murderous volcanoes. But even the early throes of pandemic proved harder to manage when it turned out she was responsible for multiple constituencies whose interests conflicted, and she couldn’t empathise with all of them.