The Lack of Empathy

I was recently asked ‘why you think it is that some folks refuse to accept or believe the experiences of others merely because they’ve never had the experience themselves?’

Part of it is that we don’t teach empathy and compassion. American Capitalism disdains them as a weakness. Men are considered weak for showing empathy and compassion, and women are considered soft and too emotional for doing it.

Without those two skills, it’s very difficult to comprehend the place from which an opposing idea might be coming, and too easy to simply dismiss the opponent who speaks of it. 

Furthermore, religious and political indoctrination often force an individual to hold two contradictory ideals in their head, while being expected to uphold and adhere to both. This is cognitive dissonance, and it leads to a pattern of thought that prepares someone to act/say/believe one thing while acting/saying/believing the exact opposite. Cognitive dissonance also makes it really difficult to absorb new information that doesn’t fit neatly within the predefined parameters of the ingrained argument. So no matter what an opponent might say, if the information is similar to one side of a known argument, it simply gets reduced into the dichotomy of their dissonance allowing them to safely ignore what is being said in favor of their favorite counter-argument. This can be considered an emotional autonomic response which allows someone to not need to question their indoctrination. Which in turn allows them to avoid any negative emotions about whatever behavior/thought the new information would produce.  

So, combine cognitive dissonance with a lack of empathy and compassion, and it’s very likely someone will never respond to new information, nor be able to understand their own behaviors and emotional responses. Which in turn makes it very unlikely they’ll understand their opponent’s either.  

This pattern is usually only broken in an individual when some tangential emotion cuts across their information/belief dichotomy. These rare occurrences, often tragic, are sometimes the only way new information can be properly processed and true learning/growing can happen.