The Empathy Equation

Caring; Community; Consequence

The capacity for empathy is part of being human. But like intelligence, it is genetically distributed along a normal curve, not in equal amounts in all of us. And like intelligence, empathy’s full expression depends on experience, learning and the environmental forces that can enhance it, or depress it.

Perhaps Mother Teresa was born at the high end of that curve and would have been a saint no matter what religion she was taught. Perhaps Jeffrey Dahmer would have been evil no matter how much he was loved, cared for and treated with empathy in his own life. Capacity is inborn, final expression is not.

I have met few people at the extremes. But they are memorable. The eight-year-old boy I’ll call Billy sent for residential treatment because of behavioral problems no normal intervention could touch.

“I hear you’re causing some problems for your teacher.” I said when we met.

“I break her fingernails,” he smiled, scraping his own across a paper between us.

I still remember his blank look, the hollow eye contact, the annoyance when I tried to explain the feelings of others: “Why are you telling me this? That’s their stuff.” In months of residential care, I don’t think we made much progress. He was bright, and able to learn that some consequences might not be worth risking. But we never taught him to care. We never found empathy receptors to develop so that he could experience other people as more than objects to be manipulated and explored to see how they would react to his actions.

His story never goes away because, for me, empathy is a core element of being human. As the lens through which we see one another, understand one another, and make peace with one another, it underlies attachment, and relationship and community. It’s hard for me to find words that convey its importance.

This week I read the following quote:

“The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy,”

Elon Musk said this on a Joe Rogan podcast in late February of this year. Using terms like “suicidal empathy” and “empathy exploit” he argued that our caring for others has stifled our growth, our success and our elevation as a culture.

It is a shocking statement, and I found myself reacting to it as I do to patients’ psychotic or delusional beliefs. First, find the seed of truth that might be there, that might be worth examining before it blossomed into something distorted beyond recognition.

I believe in something I like to call the Empathy Equation. In it are three elements: Caring, Community and Consequence. American culture has been wrestling with getting the right balance among these for decades now. And we rarely succeed. There are three simple elements in the equation:

1. Caring: concern for each person’s rights, feelings, and outcomes.

2. Community: concern for the cost of that individual caring on the community.

3. Consequences: the price we are willing to pay as a culture for that caring.

Contemporary American culture prefers the first of these, as in the obvious examples of gun ownership. The right to own a gun is an individual one; the community cost is increased gun violence in our streets; the cultural consequence (or one of many) may be the increased fear and anxiety levels in American schoolchildren.

In other countries, very different decisions are made prioritizing the community cost, and the consequences. High speed railways are built faster and more efficiently in countries where individual home ownership cannot hold up the process in courts. Forty percent tax rates are accepted as normal when healthcare is assumed to be a right that all citizens should pay for, and a healthy populace understood to be a benefit to all.

If I believed Elon Musk was arguing for more emphasis on the real consequences of empathic decisions, we might be able to agree, at least in principle, that the balance needs to be adjusted. The mental health profession has its own work to do when its overarching focus on personal feelings finds “trauma” and “toxicity” too often and avoids working toward resilience and repair.

But Musk’s premise is something more. Civilization should choose growth over all other factors. Expansion over depth, elevation over consolidation. Financial benefit for the few over the lives of those we leave behind. We shouldn’t let empathy for people slow down progress. And progress equals financial growth. This is empathy for no one. It is the worship of what my mother called The Almighty Dollar.

We have elevated to leadership people whose capacity for empathy, individual or group, is secondary to their immediate goal of making money whether for themselves alone, or in some misinformed belief that this will be good for us all in some distant future. Neither justifies the thoughtless, cruel and uncaring way decisions have been made.

I never knew what happened to Billy after he left our care. I thought of him years later when interviewing a man who had killed his mother when she came into the garage unexpectedly while he was stealing things to support his drug habit.

“Yeah, it was too bad it was her,” he offered. “But she came in, so I guess it was her time.”

We are not a herd to be culled in the service of financial goals. Or accidental casualties of necessary evil. We are a functioning unit of civilized collaborative government called a democracy. Composed of individuals who matter. And groups who deserve to be considered and protected.

The real Empathy Equation demands no less.