this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I'm not sure that's true. One side has empathy. The other does not. I don't want to be friends with someone who doesn't have empathy.
The world is not binary like that. Your side is not all good and the other side is not all bad.
I didn't say they were "all bad." I said they lacked empathy and I wasn't interested in being friends with them.
Conservative and progressive brains are different.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/
And one of those differences is empathy. https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/18/1/nsad029/7175525
You generalized as if everyone on the left has empathy and no one on the right does. That’s simply not true. Group differences like this are often larger within the group than between them. While it might be true that, on average, people on the right are less empathetic than those on the left, it’s neither fair nor accurate to imply that one side has empathy and the other doesn’t.
Eh. Fits with what I see in politics, the folks voting for right winger, and my own experiences conversing with them IRL. I see no issue with making that assumption and then being pleasantly surprised the odd time it isn't true.
Maybe it's a North America thing, tho. It's quite possible that the euro flavor of right wing is a more empathetic group.
Ive been down both sides of the indoctrination rabbit hole both the alt left and the alt right pipelines lead to the same place.
Ya, I'm not talking about extremists. I'm talking about just normal everyday people.
One would need empathy to see it that way ;)
Empathy is something that can be learned like any ability, it isn't always a binary you have it or you don't.
I kind of see your point there. My hope though is that maybe people could gain more empathy for each other by understanding that we are all human and I hope that one day people can understand each other's struggles.