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