All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 21, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:27
2622 How Can I Develop Empathy?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I've noticed that my empathy has been growing as I've become aware of how sad and destructive situations can be for people.
I empathize with others, have compassion for them.
Learning empathy is about as hard as learning Japanese and any help would be greatly appreciated.
Am I doing right?
And what other tools can I suggest to help develop empathy?
Well, that's a great question, and my first answer is, I don't know.
I mean, certainly don't know from any scientific or expert standpoint.
So, as usual, when I'm not using syllogistic arguments or quoting facts, and even those facts, of course, I mean, the syllogistic arguments are true or false, and I claim some authority on those.
The facts may be true or false.
Of course, I don't go to all-source data or replicate every experiment.
I report what I view as good data, but...
So, in this, these are just my thoughts about it.
And there's a few arguments in here that I will stand by, but I can't give you any kind of definitive answer.
I just want you to...
I mean, that's implicit, but I want you to sort of really understand that.
I don't want people to take anything I say as some sort of guruistic certainty or prescription for action.
So, developing empathy is...
First of all, the process of recognizing that we generally have self-empathy to begin with.
Self-empathy to begin with.
If we prick us, do we not bleed?
Stub your toe, it hurts.
And a thief, for instance, does not lack empathy because if empathy is understanding feelings, And I would say acting on them, then the thief certainly understands his own feelings of wanting to take something.
A rapist understands his own desire for brutal, violent sex to be inflicted on an unwilling victim.
And so a crime of passion, like a murder done out of rage, while the person feels the rage, he feels the desire to hurt and he acts upon it in tragically irreversible ways.
And so, most people, and I'm just going to say everyone, I mean, and maybe there's some exceptions, but sort of functionally everyone, understands that there are emotions that can be experienced that you can act upon.
I mean, if somebody has an emotion and does not experience it, there's no empirical verification of that.
And, you know, we slap them up to a heart monitor and whatever it is, right?
But if somebody does not act on an emotion, then it has no practical detectability in the world.
So it's kind of the same as it not occurring, right?
If somebody has no reaction whatsoever to an emotion and does not act on it in any way, it is identical to an emotion not existing.
And look, I get that there's some physiological response to almost every emotion and so on, but If you're just looking at someone and they feel a flash of fear, but they don't change their expression or widen their eyes or anything like that in any way that's detectable to you, then it's the same as it not existing.
So I'm going to talk about acting on emotions, or emotions acting upon you in some, if your eyes widen, if you shriek, if you swear to, and then obviously the person across you can tell that you're experiencing something, right?
We all have self-empathy, and that's an important thing to understand.
We all have emotions or sensations that we ourselves experience.
Now, empathy for others, right?
So, I'm going to switch.
So, I've just used empathy as the experience of emotion because self-empathy is important.
Some people, I mean, don't feel much about their childhood, don't remember much about their childhood and so on, right?
That's important.
But I can guarantee you that when you start to push them about their childhood, they'll start to feel some anxiety or, like, they'll start to feel some fear or anger or sorrow or whatever.
I mean, the emotions are there.
So, now I'm going to sort of switch the definitions just so I don't have to keep saying empathy for others, empathy for others.
But I'm going to say that now, empathy now is going to mean empathy for other people's feelings.
Now, we all become our parents.
I mean, this is a truism that is really important.
I mean, you know, absent significant self-knowledge and therapy and philosophy and so on, we all become our parents.
I mean, if we grow up in a household that speaks Croatian, we speak Croatian.
We just do.
I mean, we can learn other languages, we can stop speaking Croatian, but we'll always know Croatian, right?
It's the language you grew up in.
You can't I may stop speaking English and start speaking Klingon tomorrow, thus limiting my audience to a few people who have only seen the insides of basements and internet cleavage.
But I will still always know English, right?
So 10 years from now, if someone speaks to me in English, I can't not understand their language.
And it's our very susceptibility to that which we grew up with that means we have to be very careful about our relationships, right?
I don't spend a lot of time around cold-hearted men or crazy women because that was my environment.
I can't not speak that language, so I've got to not have that language around me.
I mean, if you had a big button on your forehead called pain...
Then you really would not be doing yourself a service by saying to people around you who push that button, yeah, great, come on over.
And you knew for sure they were going to push that button.
Call pain.
Ow.
Ow.
Mother.
Right?
You say, hey, please don't push that button.
Hey, what's the big deal?
It's fine.
Forget it.
It's fine.
Come on.
Push the button again.
Ow.
Ow.
Oh, God, it's like an ice cream headache.
Sped up migraine.
Ow, ow, ow.
And the pain lasted for days after you, right?
If people kept pushing that button called pain, then you would be a fool to spend time around such people.
You would be a masochistic to spend time around such people.
Now, of course, those people are going to say, well, it's you who's pushing that button, or there is no button, or it's all imaginary, it's all in your head, it's not real, blah, blah, blah.
They would all make up this nonsense about how it was your fault and you made me push that button and you keep hitting that button into me and all this sort of nonsense, right?
But the reality is that there are people in life In your life, probably, who caused you pain, significant pain in the past.
And every time you're around them, whether you like it or not, unless they have radically committed to different behavior, they are going to continue to be pushing your pain button.
And even if they've got radically different behavior, it's painful that they've changed after they installed the pain button.
Because it's like, well, why couldn't you change beforehand, right?
This is why it's so important for parents to change early and to change Before their child or adult child confronts them on what they've done.
I mean, if you had a mom who screamed at you and you go to your mom and say, I hate it when you scream at me, I never liked it.
She says, oh, okay, I'll stop.
And she stops.
It's like, well, that's even more annoying, right?
Enraging, really.
Well, if it's so easy to stop and you could have just stopped, why the hell didn't you say, why did you wait for me to say I didn't like it?
If you keep screaming at me, I'm not going to see you anymore.
Okay, okay, I'll stop.
Well, that's just the exercise of power.
It's a threat.
You give me blowjobs or I'm going to leave you.
Well, that's not going to be very enjoyable.
I mean, unless you're pretty cold-hearted, right?
See, no, it's just not a threat.
It's not out of pleasure, not out of knowledge, not out of desire.
It's just out of threat.
Parents have to figure this stuff out ahead of time.
And act before their children confront the moment.
And so, the pain buttons, really, it's just a very, very important thing to understand, which is why I tell people to self-monitor when they're in the presence of people.
Right?
Oh, well, you've heard me, maybe, if you've heard these shows before, you've heard me say to somebody, okay, you're home, you're 10, you think your mom's going to be away for the evening, there's a key in the door and your mom comes home.
What do you feel?
Right?
I mean, I know what my daughter feels.
She jumps up.
Mama, mama, mama!
Runs to her.
Mama gives her a big hug.
I'm so glad you're home.
Let's play.
Blah, blah, blah.
She's thrilled that she's home early.
But a lot of people, though, kind of a dread, oh, God, she's home, or feel nothing, or go hide in my room, or whatever it is, right?
Hope she doesn't have a man with her.
Hope she's sober.
All that sort of stuff.
Terrible, terrible stuff.
That's the pain button.
That's a pain button.
Or a numb button, which is kind of the...
The numb button is when the pain button gets so great at short circuits, the electricity of sensation goes dead, is killed, hopefully not permanently.
Now, the sadists that may be around you who enjoy pushing the pain button I want you to blame yourself.
That's the icing on the sadism cake, is to hurt someone and then have that person self-attack for being hurt.
I mean, if you're a sadist, that is like a delicious caramel-based macchiato with whipped cream and sugar with zero calories.
That is about as delicious.
To attack someone, to hurt that person, to abuse that person, and then have that person Continue to abuse themselves by blaming themselves for your attack?
Oh, God!
I mean, it must make the sadists shiver with absolutely deep, visceral Old Testament delight.
My God!
You really can't ask for better.
I mean, that's like a nine-course Roman meal sans vomitorium for abusers.
I get to abuse that person, and then I get to watch that person abuse herself.
For me abusing them.
Delicious!
Scrumptious!
Yummy!
Wonderful!
Shiver with delight.
And then that self-attack, of course, is...
I mean, the verbal abuse or the verbal attacks or the verbal put-downs are really there just to provide the delicious sense of control and harm that comes from watching someone self-attack as a result of being victimized.
Oh, I'm in their head now, baby!
I can hit them whenever I want.
I can hit them when they're not home.
I can hit them when they're sleeping through their dreams.
I can hit them when they're at work.
I can hit them whenever any authority figure comes in.
I can just continue to hurt that person.
Now they're pushing their own pain button, and I love to watch that pain button getting pushed.
I mean, it's a satanic braingasm of evil control levering.
So, you gotta watch out for anybody who pushes your pain button and tell them it hurts, and if they push it again, I just...
I don't have anything to do with that person.
Sorry, you push my pain button after I said it hurts.
I had a woman I was dating.
I went to see a...
A really bad Robert Downey film about some doctor in the Middle Ages or something.
17th or 18th century.
Redemption.
I can't remember.
Anyway, I was carrying popcorn and the floor was sticky and slippery and I slipped and I fell and really bruised my ribs in one of the armrests of a cinema seat, a theater seat.
And this woman I was dating accidentally...
Really, like a day or two later, when it was still very sore and bruised, accidentally thumped it.
Genuinely, actually, accidentally thumped it.
And I, like, doubled over in pain, and she giggled.
I was like, oh, boy, that's not good.
Kind of illuminating, right?
So, yeah, you ought to watch out for the pain button.
Because people who push the pain button, if you justify them, then you're saying, well, pushing my pain button is good.
There's nothing wrong with pushing my pain button.
I deserve to have my pain button pushed because I did something wrong.
I disobeyed.
I mocked them.
I didn't listen.
I dropped a plate.
It's good to push my pain button.
It's good.
Well, your unconscious says, okay, fine.
I guess we got a rule called let's push our pain button, so I'll push it.
You don't want that.
You don't want to program yourself to push your own pain button by calling it good.
What you need to say is, pushing my pain button is bad.
Pushing my pain button is unjust.
Pushing my pain button is abusive.
Pushing my pain button is immoral.
Pushing my pain button is evil.
And You have to draw that very clear line.
Pain button, not to be touched.
I mean, it should never have been installed.
Pain button, not to be touched.
And anybody who touches it, even by accident, who is informed that it's painful and who does it again, is not for me.
Now, They may do it again and then say, oh my God, I can't believe I did that again.
I'm so sorry.
Oh my God, you promised and I promised and blah, blah, blah.
You told me and I promised and I'm so sorry.
Right?
That's fine.
Okay, it can happen, right?
But if it's just a habit or they don't, you know, they say I won't and then they do and then they just keep doing it and, right?
No.
Life is short.
And pain hurts.
I mean, why would I want people who elbow me in my bruised ribs in my life and then laugh?
I'll just keep doing it.
I mean, that's a sickness.
I don't feed sadism.
I mean, I don't encourage evil, I don't subsidize bank robbers, and I don't feed sadists.
I don't drive getaway cars for rapists.
I just don't serve evil.
I would strongly suggest that you self-protect.
From the destructive around you.
Have the conversations, tell them it hurts, tell them you resent it, tell them that you don't like it.
Refrain from pushing other people's pain buttons, of course, but if you've got a pain button, and we all do, I mean, we all do, but you have to be around people who will never, never push it.
And people who do, repetitively, even after you tell them it hurts, well, What do I need to say?
The pain button is sacred.
The pain button is more sacred than any orifice you happen to possess.
Protect the pain button.
Or you'll push it forever, yourself.
And then you'll start pushing it in others, and you will be swirled down the drain into the sewer of generalized sadism.
So, empathy for the self we've got.
Now we're talking about empathy for others.
Empathy for others is to truly understand the feelings of others.
Now, people say, well, put yourself in the shoes of other people.
And that has some value.
It has some value.
But it's not particularly helpful.
Because how do you put yourself in the shoes of a sadist?
Or a sociopath?
Or a psychopath?
Or a narcissist?
How do you put yourself in the shoes of someone who never puts themselves in the shoes of anybody else?
It's kind of tricky, right?
And thought experiments have only limited value, I would argue, in understanding relationships, and that's why my suggestion and what I do is I put it to the empirical test.
If there's something that's problematic for me in a relationship, then I will put it to an empirical test.
If I suspect that somebody lacks empathy, then I will test that.
I will ask for something, or I will have that person fulfill a promise that they made some time back.
You know, I'll be there if you need anything.
Okay, I need something, right?
See what happens.
I will be vulnerable, talk about something that's difficult for me, and see what happens.
And then if it doesn't work out, then...
I chide myself, which is different from self-abuse.
I would chide myself and look for the signs that there was a lack of empathy there before, which I did not see.
There's always a sign.
Everybody's got labels.
Everybody's got a scrolling neon laser text of a function or dysfunction scrolling across their forehead.
If you don't choose to read it, or I don't choose to read it, we've got nobody we blame fundamentally but ourselves.
I'm not saying we blame ourselves, but...
You know, if every red-haired person...
I know it's verbally abusive, and I keep trying to hang out with red-haired people, and that the pattern remains unbroken, then at some point, I have to start figuring out that red-haired people are not great to hang with.
At some point, when enough evidence has accumulated, the responsibility comes to me.
I mean, the responsibility is not there for you as a kid, of course.
You're a kid, right?
Choose to be with anyone.
You just are where you are, whether you like it or not.
But if you are an adult, you have enough evidence that has accumulated over the years that if you are surrounded by abusive people when you're 25, then that is now your responsibility, right?
It's your responsibility to fix.
It becomes 100% you.
With all the caveats and sympathies for a difficult history that has led you to be responsible.
Sorry, that has led you to be susceptible to destructive people, but it's 100% you now.
Not 50%, no excuses for history, but 100% responsible.
So putting yourself in other people's shoes...
It has some value and it certainly is good.
If you have empathetic people around you, putting yourself in their shoes is a useful exercise, useful mental exercise.
And putting yourself in the shoes of other people...
Who are cold or narcissistic or sociopathic or sadistic or whatever it is, right?
Just mean people, selfish people.
Putting yourself in their shoes, I mean, I don't know, maybe it has some value.
I've never had much luck with it.
I can't really get into the mindset of people who are like that.
It's just too foreign to me.
But you can...
I prefer empirical tests to thought exercises in imagination.
So the empirical tests for empathy are, does the person initiate...
Here's some tests for empathy of people in your life.
You can apply this to yourself as well.
So empathy, does the person notice that you are upset and initiate a conversation even if you are not particularly aware that you're upset?
That's one.
The second is when you're engaged in a conversation about personal matters or difficult matters, Or matters requiring empathy on the part of the other person.
Do they appear to have like a countdown timer?
In other words, you've got like, okay, you've got three minutes to deal with this issue or I'm going to get impatient and change the subject.
Do you get glib, caustic answers that stick in your brain?
You know, things like man up.
Or stop whining.
Or, you've just got to stand up for yourself and stop being such a pussy.
Or, you know, these glib, harsh answers that really bruise the delicacies of personal growth, that really stick in your head like, ow, and that are kind of like conversation enders for that topic.
I got a friend years ago who was going through some difficult personal stuff, and I was there for him.
I spoke for hours about this stuff, listened, gave him my thoughts, and all that.
And then I had a problem with a breakup.
I tried to talk about it with him.
We got about 10 minutes in and he's like, dude, I don't want to be a therapist.
I'm like, oh, I don't believe that was your opinion when I was giving you feedback and thoughts and I'm not asking you to be my therapist, I'm asking you to be my friend.
Oh, well, you just keep getting into these situations and I'm tired of it.
It's like, when have I ever talked about a breakup with you before?
Anyway, you're just going to get it, right?
If you feel like there's a countdown timer.
Are they interested in your thoughts or experiences that have no particular effect on their life?
I was driving with someone years ago.
Great song.
It was on my CD. I loved the beginning of it.
You Know My Love by...
I mean, its original song is not by Colin James, but Colin James does a great version.
And I love the beginning.
It's very meaty, it's very bluesy, but also kind of jazzy.
And I said to this person, oh man, just listen to the first 30 seconds of this song.
And I turned it up a little.
I said, this is amazing.
I rewound it.
And within five seconds, he began talking.
About something unrelated, with no mention of the fact that I just asked him to listen to 30 seconds of something that I really liked.
Well, that's important.
And again, that relationship didn't last.
Just these tests, you notice these things, you've got to be alert and aware of these things.
If you talk about something that has no impact on the other person's life, Your hobby or something, some band that you saw that really excites you.
Is the person curious?
Like, what do you like about this song?
Help me understand it.
Is it like any other songs that you've heard?
I mean, what is it that you like about X and Y and Z, right?
And if you've got something that you love in your life, then people should really be interested or care about that, right?
So, when I was a teenager, I listened to Side 3 of Pink Floyd's The Wall, like, every night before going to bed.
And nobody ever asked me why.
But what happened was my brother actually just hid the record so that I couldn't find it because I wouldn't play it anymore.
I played it on headphones for the most part, although sometimes I didn't.
But nobody ever asked me in my family or even my friends why.
The only time it ever came up was a friend of mine who's now an artist would draw lots of cartoons of us playing Dungeons and Dragons or other things.
And he made a cartoon sort of making fun of my Addiction or interest in Pink Floyd's The Wall, and on it, coming out of the speakers was, Mama's gonna make all of your nightmares come true.
And my mom found this and freaked out, right?
And we had to sort of explain, no, no, no, it's a song, and blah, blah, blah, and we had to sort of pretend like it wasn't something that...
Right, it's all nonsense, right?
It was just, cover it up, right?
Mom's upset.
Let's cover it up.
Let's lie about it.
Let's always just, you know, it's funny.
It's not true.
He doesn't believe it.
It was just a song.
Here's the lyrics on the album.
Blah, blah, blah, right?
So, even when it sort of came up by accident, it had to be covered up, you see.
Because otherwise, too much truth might show up in the family.
Too much curiosity.
And I don't remember my family being curious about anything.
Like when I got into objectivism, Ayn Rand.
I mean, nobody ever asked me Why?
It interested me or what I liked about it or what spoke to me about it or anything like that.
They just mocked it, said it was sort of silly, and my mom sort of bitterly said that I had replaced her with Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand became your mother when you were a teenager, and she was upset about it and all that, right?
So she sort of became about her feelings and her thoughts, never about what my experience was or what I wanted or anything like that.
And, tragically, that was the extent, I mean, of people's curiosity about what I liked.
You know, I like the band Queen.
Nobody ever asked me, and my wife asked me.
And there's lots of good reasons which I'll talk about at some point, which I think, not because anybody's interested in my interest in Queen, but it's sort of an example of why somebody might become very interested in some particular thing.
Why does it move you?
Why does it interest you?
What speaks to you about it and all that kind of stuff?
I mean, I think that's really important to try and understand people.
Now, a lot of times things that you're interested in, particularly when you're younger, may be things which are difficult for other people, right?
So why was I interested in the wall?
Well, because I was traumatized by my family and the wall is about a very Narcissistic mother and an absent father.
Ooh, I wonder if there could be anything to do with that in my life, right?
So people didn't want to examine that because it was so obvious that it was my life that was being portrayed in this song, in this album, this whole album.
I mean, people think it's about fascism, but I mean, what it does do, of course, is it ties fascism in with the family and childhood experiences, which is why it's such a powerful work of art, which I will perhaps review one day.
I'd like to listen to it again.
I haven't listened to it in years, but it is a fantastic, fantastic album.
And one of the few albums that does actually tackle the relationship between politics and marriage and childhood experiences and so on.
It's a very, very important work.
And so, the things that I was interested in were generally just marked as obsessions by other people.
Like, I did actually get obsessed with a woman once.
I didn't stalk her or anything, but I get obsessed.
Well, with a woman I dated, and I went back to the town for work.
When I was working as a gold founder and prospector and stuff, I went back to the town where we first met, and I just really, really wanted to go out with her again, and I tried wooing her and all that.
And the people that I was...
I'd worked with them before.
We were kind of friends.
There was, in fact, a friend of mine of many years who I was working with.
Nobody ever asked me what was going on with me.
I mean, they would sort of laugh at me and play that song, Obsession, You're My Obsession, just sort of to make fun of it, but they wouldn't actually ask me any questions about why I was experiencing this.
And, you know, that's caused a complete lack of empathy and curiosity.
And it would require that they had asked any questions of themselves before asking questions of me, that they had attempted to understand themselves before they Understood anything about me.
And they didn't want to do that, right?
Because they just didn't have that habit and it would be very costly for them.
And again, I'm not sort of trying to bore you with my history with people's coldness, but I think it is really important to understand that there are markers, there are tests, there are things that you can see that will help you, really help you to detect empathy or not in people around you.
So I guess the question then is...
It's something of interest to you, of interest to others, because it is of interest to you.
I want to make that clear.
It's something of interest to you, of interest to others, because it is of interest to you.
Love is wanting to know the other person's thoughts and experiences because they are the other person's thoughts and experiences, not because they're useful to you, not because they're immediately interesting to you, not because you're curious about The thoughts and experiences because you don't know ahead of time but because you're curious about the person.
Do you understand curiosity about the person?
That's the key.
Are you interested in what other people are interested in because you love them and you want to understand them?
What makes them tick?
I have a shameful and disgraceful thing that happened to my brother.
My wife was very interested in a book, and she asked me to read it, and it took me over a year.
Terrible.
I mean, sorry, she didn't tell me, go read it.
She said, this is a book that's really important to me.
Of course, I should have just picked it up and read it.
I mean, it was not right.
And I did read it, and I thanked her for reading it, and I got to ask her why she liked it so much, and when in her life she discovered it.
That stuff is super important.
You understand?
Now, if you want to work on your own empathy, it's not that hard, at least to know what to do.
Master it.
It's tough, right?
I can tell you what to do to become a great gymnast, keep practicing gymnastics, but it doesn't mean that I think it's easy.
But what you do is, you know, I'm a big one for writing things down.
Write down all the people There are lots of spaces around them on a piece of paper that you love, right?
I know all the names of the people that you love.
And then all you have to do is write down their likes and dislikes.
What are they into?
What music?
What books?
Movies?
People?
Events?
Causes?
You name it.
And then why?
Why are they into those things?
Is it childhood stuff?
Is it vanity?
Is it for the sake of appearance?
Another way of saying vanity, I suppose.
Or, you know, is it a genuine desire for whatever, whatever, right?
So if they're into animal rights, why are they into animal rights?
And you should know these things about all the people that you claim to love.
You should know what they're interested in, what their likes and dislikes are, what their dating history is, what their childhood was like, what they like and dislike and why.
And wherever you have missing information, you go get it.
Go get that information.
Go get it, boy.
Go get it, fetch.
Go get it, boy.
Good boy.
Just go get it.
Go get an emotional...
Aesthetic, psychological map of the people around you.
How can you claim to love something that you don't know?
You must know people to love them.
I love Africa.
Ever been there?
No.
Have you seen pictures?
Not a couple, I guess.
Have any books on it?
No.
Well, you don't really know it very well, do you?
What are the countries in Africa?
I don't know.
Animals?
Tigers?
If you don't know something, You cannot claim to love it.
If love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous, then we must, my friends, know the virtue of others and know the virtue of ourselves in order to have love.
Love is the meat and drink of life, and one of the reasons I encourage people to virtue is I want them to experience love.
Virtue is the diet, love is the fat-free dessert.
You've got to know the people around you.
Know them really well.
And through that process of knowing them, you will affect them.
Through that process of learning about them, they will learn about themselves and about you.
So, number two.
A sign of a lack of of empathy towards others, of course, is consideration based upon utility.
In other words, consideration, quote, politeness, niceness, all that kind of stuff, is based upon utility and very often based upon power, hierarchy.
So, if your boyfriend is super nice to his boss, And then a jerk to a waiter, then that's a sign that his niceness is manipulative.
It is a form of status climbing.
And you really got to watch out for that.
Because I tell you, if you are with someone who's pretty selfish and lacks empathy, then when you see them treat someone badly, the person you see them treat the worst is how they will treat you in time.
Let me repeat that.
The person that you see them treat the worst is how they will treat you in time.
We all understand that selfish people can be very charming when they want something from you.
Let me money, pick me up at the airport, I want to have sex with you, whatever, right?
The guy's super charming, then he has sex with the woman, and he doesn't call her.
He just basically gets up and goes.
Because he's got what he wants, so why on earth would he be charming?
Why would you?
It's like going to get stitches again when your wound is healed.
Why would you do it?
It's like saying I should drive home when you're already home.
You got what you wanted, you are where you wanted, why would you expend further effort?
I mean, naturally, the sort of two-faced thing It's important, you know, they're smiling and chatting with someone as that person walks out the door and then they turn around and say, can you believe that person?
Oh my God, they said this, they said that, how ridiculous, blah, blah, blah, right?
But the hierarchy thing is really important.
Bullies come out when they perceive themselves to be in, obviously, a dominant structure.
And over time, relationships, power accrues in relationships because of sunk costs, right?
I mean, if you don't like someone at a party, you're not likely to want to hang out, right?
Get the number, boy or girl, doesn't matter.
But if you've been friends for 20 years, then you have a lot invested in that friendship, right?
So, having a longer-term relationship and the length of that relationship as it goes up, so does the power of people in that relationship.
That's very important to understand.
Which is why people start off nice when they're dating, usually, and then they're nice when they want to propose, and then they're nice when they get married, and then their relationship quality and their commitment to and work in and efforts towards and putting themselves out for the relationship deteriorate.
Because The voluntary nature of the relationship declines as the investment inexorably rises over time.
So, that's important.
So, people who bully through power will become more bullying over the course of a longer-term relationship because you've got the sunk costs.
So, if you're in a job, let's say, you've been working there 20 years, you've got another five years to go, and if you hang in there, you get a great pension.
Well, your boss knows that you can't quit.
So he can kind of be a dick, and he knows you can't quit.
Because you're heavily invested in the relationship.
I've talked to lots of people in the public sector in this kind of bind.
Well, I got my pension coming.
Sucky thing is you probably won't have much of that pension coming.
Certainly not all of it.
Oh well.
People have to learn.
People have to learn.
If I don't teach you, reality will.
If I can't teach you to quit that smoking, your lungs will teach you to quit that living.
So, longer-term relationships, more sunk costs, more wrapped up in each other, and therefore, greater bullying for people without empathy.
Now, another thing that you'll see in people without empathy, and sort of to counter that, you have to look at your Relationships.
Just look at your relationships around again.
Get a nice piece of paper, put down your relationship.
Brother, sister, mother, aunt, friend, lover, dater, acquaintance, whatever, boss.
And put down the length of the relationship.
Draw a little line, you know, centimeter per year, half a centimeter per year or something like that.
Put a little line.
Look at the relationships.
If you do this in Excel, maybe you can sort by lengths there.
And then look at your energy expenditures, your resource expenditures in those relationships.
I bet you they'll be inversely proportional for the most part.
Unless there's some other thing like guilt or obligation or something like that that's overriding just the sort of fallacy of sunk costs.
But you probably take your longest-term relationships more for granted than you do your shorter-term relationships.
And what you want to do is at least equalize that and ideally reverse it.
Your longer-term relationships are the ones that are the most important, and therefore you should be putting the most effort into maintaining and growing, right?
That's kind of important, right?
Because they're the ones that are going to be, in many ways, the most difficult if you lose them, and they're the ones that have the momentum to carry you through to the very inconvenient stage of life, which I hope to reach, called old age.
So look at Effort invested, like number of phone calls, going at a visit, going out for dinner, hanging out, chatting, hours invested, time invested, per week or month, length of the relationship.
Bet you bet you dollars to donuts, the longer the relationship, the less you invest in it.
Because the sunk cost of the other person means that you can not maintain it.
So, reverse that and take your longest term relationships and put the effort in there.
Also, look at where you put the most effort into your relationships and you can put them in the hierarchy of utility to you.
Right?
And I would recommend making...
having a standard which says, I refuse...
To be nicer to people with more utility, and I refuse to be less nice to people with less utility to me, right?
Which is called having standards of behavior, right?
Rather than just reacting to that which is useful to you, but having standards of behavior, treating people as human beings rather than as utility bots to service your preferences.
Treat people as people, not objects, not things, not service bots, right?
So that's pretty important too.
You make a commitment to have dignity and respect or whatever Dr.
Phil says, but you make a commitment to have a standard of care proportional to the length of the relationship rather than inversely proportional.
And you treat your least voluntary relationships as the most voluntary, right?
Family, you treat them as the most voluntary.
I sort of view every day with my daughter like I'm auditioning to be a babysitter or auditioning to be a dad.
And she can say, no, next, right?
So I want to have the best time with me.
Treating each day as if I had the most voluntarism.
Whereas what we do is, of course, our involuntary relationships, we bring the lowest standards to them.
And there's nothing really fundamentally more humiliating.
Than being bullied by someone who was just nice to someone else.
That's exquisitely, deeply, revoltingly, almost unbearably humiliating.
To be bullied by someone who was just nice to someone else.
Or, conversely, being treated like crap by someone and then the phone rings and it's someone like, oh, hi, how you doing?
All kinds of positive and all that, right?
So, to have standards to raise your capacity of empathy, then you create objective standards for how you're going to treat people, and you make them rational, right?
Your longest-term relationships are the ones that you should invest the most into.
And you should have a standard of care for people that is independent of their utility to you.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I don't mean that you should be a slave to the longest-term relationships.
I just mean you should invest the most in.
I'm not saying you should keep investing the most into them.
But the longest-term relationships are the ones that tend to get the most sclerotic.
They tend to get the most height-bound and stiff.
Rigor mortis sets in.
Everything becomes habit and it becomes boring and nothing new and all that.
And that's where you need to invest energy into creating something new about the conversation.
You need to bring your thoughts, you know, you need to bring your energies, your preferences and so on to those relationships.
Now, if those relationships turn out to be constrictive, abusive, destructive, whatever, you can make whatever choice you want.
I know which one I would make, but you can make whatever choice you want and at least you have given it a good shot, a fair shot.
Give the bad people almost every opportunity to be better and Let your heart gauge the empiricism of the experience.
So that's important.
Empathy is treating people not as a means to your end.
You're useful.
I'll be nice to you.
You know, you're mean.
Sorry, you're ugly.
You're unattractive.
You're inconsequential.
You're poor.
I mean, you can sort of imagine some wannabe actress at a Hollywood party And she's not going to chat nicely to the busboy when there are casting agents and directors at the party.
She's going to be angling towards those people with the most power and putting on her dazzling charm for those people.
And if the busboy attempts to engage her in conversation, she's going to snap at him and tell him to basically get lost one way or another.
But that, of course, is treating people as...
A means to your end.
Director might cast me, casting director might help me get cast, more casting agent, and busboy can't do anything for me, and therefore, right?
I thought it would be fun when I was younger, and if I had become a sort of theater or movie director, to have gone to a party dressed as a busboy.
And then to have cast the woman, the first woman who was nice to me would get an audition for my film.
He wouldn't be able to do it too often because he would get known.
Imagine!
The woman who's nice to the busboy gets a call and says so-and-so wants you to audition and then shows up and she recognizes him as the busboy.
I think that would be great.
And have all the busboys pretend to be directors.
Have them all dressed really nice and deck them out in Rolex watches and so on.
I just think that would be funny.
Oh, stick it to narcissists and vainglorious fools.
It's a delight.
I mean that in a fully empathetic way.
I'm still working on mine.
But I've seen that.
I mean, we've all experienced this, right?
So, you may be talking to some gorgeous woman at a party.
You know, she may deign to talk to you for a bit, but she's always standing in the room looking for someone better to talk to.
And she'll ask you to repeat yourself.
You tell her something and she'll pause.
Excuse me, what?
Showing that she's clearly not listening to you.
And it's because she's looking for someone who is, you know, hypogamy up, right?
Who's going to raise her status and so on.
And guys do this too, of course.
But, I mean, I've always had a standard, and I do this when I meet listeners and so on in person.
Like, it doesn't matter to me what you look like.
It doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor.
I will treat you the same, no matter what.
And I think if you've met me, you can testify to this.
I don't try and gravitate towards the people who might be most useful to my show.
You know, if somebody wants to talk to me, I will sit down and talk with them.
I may even have dinner with them if I have time.
I will listen.
I will certainly give feedback if asked.
We will have a conversation.
And it's not, you know, are you of utility to me and will you help me achieve what I want to achieve?
But no, you're a human being.
You're a human being.
And you deserve to be treated with respect and to be listened to.
Almost no matter what.
So these are some tips about how to grow your empathy.
And I hope they help.
Please let me know if these are of all of use or if you have other better ones or different ones that I can add to this sort of list.
Thank you, of course, so much for listening to this show.
I am honored and delighted to be at the center of this great, world-shaking conversation.
It's a true honor.
And if you'd like to help out, fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
Really, really appreciate whatever you can do to help out.
And update on the documentaries coming along.
And we have a sound engineer working on putting it all together.
So hopefully not too much longer.
I wish I knew enough about the film business to tell you exactly how long.
Other than just saying not too much.
Thank you so much.
▲
Export Selection