Lack of Empathy
Dec. 12th, 2004 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mishalakDisclaimer (to cover my ass in the vernacular) Of course I don't know this is true, but it seem to be to me. I write in response to some stuff about how people lower on the "power pyramid" can easily understand people further up and it doesn't work so easily the other way. Which I think is just as blind or as true as any of the stories that the powerful tell themselves about how they are not understood and yet really understand what the poor are thinking. I always feel like I know enough to see things differently, but never enough to say what is really true. So many facts, it is all a muddle.
It is easy to empathetic with people who are like you. It is easy to see a slightly different point of view. What is hard is to actually walk in the shoes of someone who you see as other than like you, rather than assuming you already know.
Up or down, rich or poor, woman or man, we all construct elaborate stories in our heads about how the other can't really understand us, but how we really understand what's going on in someone else's head. Because we're wiser, smarter, more in tune with emotions, less irrational, more inquisitive, more decisive, and all the other things we believe best in ourselves. The powerful dismiss the poor as lazy and the powerless dismiss the rich as blind. None of us, not even me, really see with cloudless eyes what is in the other's mind.
We're all storytellers, telling lies to ourselves that we really understand the world and the people in it.
It is easy to empathetic with people who are like you. It is easy to see a slightly different point of view. What is hard is to actually walk in the shoes of someone who you see as other than like you, rather than assuming you already know.
Up or down, rich or poor, woman or man, we all construct elaborate stories in our heads about how the other can't really understand us, but how we really understand what's going on in someone else's head. Because we're wiser, smarter, more in tune with emotions, less irrational, more inquisitive, more decisive, and all the other things we believe best in ourselves. The powerful dismiss the poor as lazy and the powerless dismiss the rich as blind. None of us, not even me, really see with cloudless eyes what is in the other's mind.
We're all storytellers, telling lies to ourselves that we really understand the world and the people in it.