Empathy and compassion: Difference between revisions

Hougaard ’s four reasons:

Empathy is the impulse that makes you cry at the movies. It doesn’t come from a rational place. It is not the output of a deliberative function. Now we have have doubts about homo sapiens’ capacity for logic at the best of times, readers, but when you act based on empathy you are not even trying to be logical.

We like to think it leaders are logical: slower rather than hasty to react, considerate of all positions and constituencies. We would rather a leader did not act at all than acted precipitately.

Being instinctive, the empathetic instinct is not necessary fair, equitable or just. It comes from the animal brain. It favours kin, familiarity, and reinforces our prevailing values and worldview. It shoots without asking questions.

To be empathetic is to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, to live their [[lived experience]]; to look at the world from their perspective. It is to ''take sides. This is something to value in the family dog, and your own mother. Not 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 terrirism, 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.