When empathy thins, division pays

One of the first casualties of structural overload is our collective emotional intelligence. Empathy is not a soft add-on or a private virtue. It is intensive work for the brain and basic infrastructure for any humanist society. It demands time, safety and a certain inner spaciousness to imagine another person’s reality and let it matter.

When people live in mental survival mode for years, that space collapses. The nervous system quietly reorders its priorities. Protect your own. Shrink your circle. Save energy. You do not stop caring in principle, but in practice there is less left over. Everyday kindness becomes harder. The benefit of the doubt becomes rarer. The social fabric that once held different lives together wears down thread by thread.

This is the emotional ground modern populism builds on. When empathy is weakened, it becomes far easier to sort people into “us” and “them”, to blame rather than understand, to see your own security as dependent on someone else’s loss. The same forces that drain our cognitive capacity also drain our willingness to see complexity in other human beings.

Populism does not need to create fear and anger; those feelings are already produced by economic insecurity, climate anxiety and the attention economy. What populism does is give these feelings a target. Migrants. “Elites”. Welfare recipients. Environmentalists. Brussels. Any group will do, as long as it can be painted as the reason why you feel unsafe and exhausted.

The rise of polarization is not a bug in the system. It is a business model built on exhausted minds. A population with weakened empathy will not instinctively search for common ground. It will look for someone to blame.

For climate and justice politics this is disastrous. Any serious transition requires trust, patience and a willingness to share burdens in a way that feels fair. A society running on thin emotional and cognitive margins will not automatically choose fairness. It will choose apparent simplicity. It will choose whoever promises quick relief and a clear scapegoat.

--Frode Kjærvik, excerpt from When a Civilization Wears Down Its Own Mind 

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”  --Ocean Vuong

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”  --Ursula K. Le Guin

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.

[…]

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

--Grace Paley

"In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down."  --Kahlil Gibran

"The first [quality of growing older] is humility. Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

The other quality is curiosity. If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure."  --Nick Cage

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch… keeping those lines open to ourselves."  --Joan Didion