Someone liked my tweet about my previous post. So I followed her twitter account, and then onto her blog, and there saw a link to the above RSA video. This dovetailed with a topic I had been thinking about.
I have a number of friends in the USA who are emotionally devastated about Trump (and that is overstating it), while others are deeply wrestling with personal challenges about what they face in 2017 (life in a developing country can be complicated!). I want to empathise with them, and some I can (like those traumatised by Trump) while others are not so easy (like the one struggling to sell a complicated business setup so that they can retire). My measure of empathy is largely conditioned by whether I have some personal experience which I can draw on to help me understand where they're at. It's not easy sometimes, even if I choose to try to be empathetic rather than the less-than-helpful sympathetic. This raises a question for me: how do I empathize when I have no personal experience to which I can relate the struggles of others. Children being seriously ill took on a new meaning when my daughter nearly died. Tragic death took on a new meaning when my mother was murdered. Living without either parent had a different meaning when my father subsequently died. It was after these events that I could better empathise with others because I had relatable experience. The negative side of not feeling empathy is that this can result in becoming obsessively focused on oneself. When one cannot empathise (or chooses not to), it is the personal vulnerabilities of our own lives that fill our vision, because we've failed to make space to feel the vulnerabilities of others. This, perhaps, is one of the root causes of abusive leadership in our nations and institutions. Trump has no affinity for the blue collar worker (and bizarrely, why did so many vote for him?), and so what does he care about developments such as this one, where the USA is losing the lead and consequently millions of potential jobs in renewable energy? I imagine he cares only to the extent that such events touch his own insecurities, because in Trump's emotion-filled world the vulnerabilities of concern are those of his own ego. My own president (Zuma) is a good African counterpart ... seemingly having no capacity to feel guilt, no capacity to empathise with those impacted when his actions hurt the nation, and being a misogynist to boot. And because I profess a Christian faith, I also have to point a finger at the global church. Where is the church's empathy for the spiritual malaise of the post-modern relativist in a deeply polarized world of unstructured violence? Is the church leadership unable to empathise - with all that the word entails? Is it because the church leadership has so decoupled themselves from society that they have little comprehension of the secular post-Christian life experience? Is it because, they too, have filled their vision with the vulnerabilities of an institutional ego?
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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