Most of the time when someone talks about empathy they talk about understanding another person’s emotions, understanding their feelings. They might also focus on “seeing things from someone else’s point of view”. But that’s advanced stuff.
When we think about empathy, we need to begin at the most basic level. And doing so doesn’t require having another person to try to understand. Empathy begins at home. The most basic step of empathy is understanding that your emotions and feelings, your thoughts and experiences, you, all of that is yours and everyone who isn’t you… aren’t you.
The first step of empathy is realizing that just because you feel and think some way doesn’t mean that everyone, or anyone, feels or thinks exactly the same way. But too many people skip this part of empathy. In fact, humans seem to almost always assume that other people think the way they do.
One of the places you can see this is in politics. Someone who is a lousy person, who thinks other people aren’t worth caring about, sees someone else caring about people and they assume that person is faking it, that they are “virtue signaling”. That person must only be pretending to care about others in order to get something, to win an election, or gain support for another reason. Because if the lousy person doesn’t care about others, and they have colleagues who also don’t care about others, then not caring about others must be normal. Nobody really cares about anybody, and anyone displaying otherwise is lying. Conversely, someone who does actually care about issues and is serious about their viewpoints assumes that their opponents must also be serious about the things they do and say. I hope you can see how this is going to lead to problems. On one hand you have a person advocating about education, and their opponent thinks “they don’t care about education, they are just trying to buy votes!” Going another way, you can have a person who is espousing divisive rhetoric just to pander for votes, and their opponent acts as if those views are deeply held beliefs.
Another example of this are places on the internet like 4chan. There you will find a message board of anonymous posters spewing a lot of racist stuff. I knew a person who hung out there and sarcastically posted racist and sexist “jokes” because it was funny and “nobody is serious”. But some of the people there ARE serious. Very serious. And there is no way to know for sure, being that it’s all anonymous. While the person I knew was just doing it “for the lulz” and assumed everyone else was too, there were clearly other people who very much were racists and sexist and assumed they’d found a community of like-minded individuals. It took a couple of shootings and manifestos for him to finally stop participating.
You have to be careful when you start assuming that everyone around you is thinking and feeling the same way you are for the same reasons you are. And that is the first step of empathy. You need to realize that your positions, your feelings, your experiences, they are yours, and other people don’t necessarily have them, they don’t know where you are coming from.
This leads us to Ted Lasso, and quite possibly one of the finest scenes ever filmed.
“Be curious, not judgmental.” – not Walt Whitman