Empathy for the Devil

Won't you guess my name?

NOT sympathy, though.

"Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy" - Captain G. M. Gilbert

This is a quote from an Army psychologist who was assigned to observe the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials in 1945.

“In my work with the defendants,” Gilbert wrote, “I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.”

This quote’s been doing the rounds this week for, I think, pretty obvious reasons.

The actions of the new U.S. administration prove that they are a group of people incapable of empathy.

Your fellow human beings are human (all of them).

Empathizing with other people isn’t always easy. Especially when their lives seem completely unlike your own.

But if you don’t even try to empathize, you certainly won’t manage it. In fact, you may find you’re able to treat other people as less than human.

That’s what we’re seeing now.

This administration sees anyone with different beliefs — or skin colour, sexual orientation, cultural background — as unworthy of empathy, and worthy of attacks, incarceration, joblessness, detention, deportation, and quite possibly worse.

Watching all this take shape over the past few days has been awful in a way I don’t have words to express.

But rather than bemoan that any further here, I’d like to make a perhaps surprising suggestion:

Let’s empathize with the evil people.

That’s right. Let’s try to have empathy for the people who are using their power to destroy the lives of those with less power than them.

To be abundantly clear: this does not mean agreeing with them. Or sympathizing with them. Because, well… I just called them evil, and I stand by that.

They don’t deserve our sympathy, and if you agree with them, you’re reading the wrong newsletter.

So why empathize with them? Because I want to know what they’re seeing and thinking.

I want to know if (and when, and how) they can be defeated, and simply pointing out that they are bad and doing bad things doesn’t seem like it will be enough.

How do they think? How do they feel? What drives them?

Bigoted violence as defense mechanism.

There are a lot of people in the administration, and not all of them are motivated by the exact same thing.

But I’ll venture a guess that two themes run through all of their lives and hearts:

1. The desire for power

2. The need for retribution

They say that bullies are victims too. In a way, that may apply to a lot of these people. At some point in their lives, they felt powerless and afraid, and were hurt by others.

Instead of trying to find a way to take better care of themselves, to feel loved and safe inside by loving others, they found another solution: project their fear and pain outward, and take it out on people with less power than them.

Their drive to get power — and not the usual kind that high political office affords, but an absolute, totalitarian kind of power — is a way of asserting their agency that prevents anyone from touching them or fighting back.

And they want that kind of power so they can take revenge against anyone who caused them pain earlier in their lives.

Empathy for the empathyless.

The terror of watching these people and trying to understand them is that you see very quickly that they could not act as they do if they had an ounce of empathy for others.

There may be reasons why each of them lacks that basic human capacity to see and feel with other people.

I don’t really care. I want to know what makes them tick because the sources of our strength are often very closely linked to the sources of our weakness.

The same instincts that allow them to visit this awful cruelty on the world may hold the key to their eventual defeat and downfall.

I don’t pretend to know anything about anything, nor about what to do right now. But I’m trying to get clear on what we’re facing and where the potential for hope might lie.

If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.