Empathy and Failures of Democracies | Hacker News Reader

Empathy and Failures of Democracies

mebassett.info

55 pointsmebassett67 comments

I would also note that empathy has shown to be weaponizable - i.e. you can use empathy to some people to justify oppression of others and dehumanize them. My observations in American politics today is that this is largely what the political debate has devolved into - you find some cause that sufficiently many people empathize with, you dress it up, and you use that to drive your agenda. I think it's no surprise that the causes that tend to be among the most partisan (and the most reliable when it comes to turning out supporters and votes) are basically moral panics, like abortion on the right, or guns on the left.

Good point. I guess the Palestinians fall under that category.

Empathy, no. Being charitable in your appraisal of your opponent, yes. Meaning, don't assume off the bat that your opponent is malicious unless you have good reason to believe that. Also, acquaint yourself with the views of your opponent before dismissing them as stupid. Charity, not empathy, is the proper attitude. Empathy prioritizes feelings over truth and reason. This is dangerous, foolish, and wrong. Truths may be painful, and where appropriate, we should be charitable toward those in error and find the truth painful, but we should never sacrifice truth or prefer feelings over truth and reasoned arguments. We are also foolish to expect everyone competent and capable of reasoned argument. That is why we have authorities. Really, the authorities are at fault here because they have given the masses license to behave aggressively and boorishly when they should be discussing instead of peddling their latest tendentious sophistry and bullshit.

I think it’s easy to conflate empathy with forgiveness. Empathy is about understanding someone’s viewpoint to the degree that you feel a reflection of their emotions. This requires a mixture of reason and emotionality: reason to bridge the gap in world views. It does not preclude truth or judgement. One can empathize with a murderer by understanding their background and motivations, but still want them to be locked up. I think it is important to empathize with criminals for the express reason that you want to find out how to prevent further criminal acts.

I quite agree with the article. I am quite unabashedly liberal, but I understand why conservatives exist (here I’m using the United States polarity) and even why they need to. The idea that one side or the other is an inherently destructive force is repellent.

I’m using your comment as a springboard for these thoughts btw, I’m not disagreeing with you.

I often have to remind myself that I actually agree with liberals on a lot of things like abortion, gay marriage and immigration - I just find myself reflexively disagreeing with them because of the unfair way they portray their opponents.

Agreed. It is so easy to assume the worst from anyone - especially on the internet. It helps me, personally, to reread through someone's words and try to grasp what they are saying as strongly as possible before reacting.

Keep in mind that, while there is one truth, there are many reactions to that truth. Understanding that your reaction might not be the only reasonable one is a function of empathy.

Couple that with the fact that the truth may not be apparent and the possibility that things about which you are certain may not be true, and humility and empathy begin to take a more central role.

I wonder if anyone else relates to this. I feel like up until the last few years, my understanding of "empathy" was always very different than how it is often used now. Empathy was literally putting yourself in another person's shoes, understanding their emotional perspective. But the key there is that it was one person. Like, a friend, or a therapist to a client, etc. A relationship free of agenda.

Now I often see it as almost a corporate kind of buzzword, like with UI/UX people having "empathy" for their users (in order to understand "their" needs and make more money from them). Or people having "empathy" for populations for political reasons as a way to build political support for something. It seems more related to the language of branding and marketing now.

Yes, you're not alone. Oddly enough, it's been repurposed to mean something akin to value alignment or strategic cooperation. It used to mean thoughtful kindness, and this change seems to have suddenly happened in the last five years.

It's usage now makes me vaguely uncomfortable because it feels borderline sociopathic or manipulative.

Yeah, exactly. Which is particularly maddening because sociopathy is about the absence of empathy.

Art helps facilitate communication. You can communicate an entire, massive, powerful idea by just saying "1984." That's where the power lies. The thought experiment aspect is nice too but you can write any old book to push any old narrative if you think enough people will buy it. I think that's neither here nor there.

This analysis is uni-dimensional. There is nothing special about Democracy, per se, or even about standard political issues. We are highly political creates and you'll notice the very same patterns of calling the other side stupid or assuming they have an agenda with regards to basically anything. Though credit where credit is due, I think the subtext is saying "wait, are we in trouble?". That's not an entirely silly notion IMHO. History has shown things can progress and then go back the other way.

We might have left the tribes but tribalism never left us. We have upgraded ourselves a little bit, but there is a long way to go. There are many underlying problems with our cognition that paint a pretty bleak picture with regards to "can't we all just get along?", but all is not lost. Just as The Enlightenment moved people away from relying on Mysticism as a philosophy, there is an ongoing dialectic around these issues that has the chance to birth a new philosophy that can help elevate our thinking further.

In general just being aware of all our cognitive pitfalls, I think, will go a long way and there is also language that goes along with new ideas to help us communicate using new tools.

I'll list some books I've read/I'm reading on the journey to help me figure this out. Most of this paints a picture that says "we need to actively adopt a philosophy where we emphasize digging into the opponents side more, also, yes they likely are coming to faulty conclusions, but still give them the benefit of the doubt as it will strengthen your own thinking."

History (last 14,000 years):

  Why Nations Fail
  The Origins of Political Order
  Sapiens
  Guns, Germs & Steel

Psychology:

  Thinking Fast and Slow
  The Elephant In The Brain
  Predictably Irrational

Poltics:

  The Righteous Mind
  The Political Mind
  Chimpanzee Politics
  In Defense of Troublemakers
  A General Theory of Bureaucracy

Communications:

  Words That Work
  Shortcut
  Surfaces & Essences
  Metaphors We Live By
  On Controversy
  Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision Making

I'd suggest 'Plagues and Peoples' over 'Guns, Germs and Steel'

Thanks for the recommendation! Plagues have definitely had an important impact on the river of history.

Is there any particular reason to read Plagues and Peoples instead of Guns, Germs and Steel rather than in addition to?

GGS isn't super well respected by historians. Diamond ignores a bunch of conflicting data when presenting his grand theory. It also presupposes a lot about how cultures "win". It's not a bad book but if you aren't careful it is easy to take it to mean more than it does.

Yeah, that's my impression of it too. I included it because it's very well known and given a lot of people have read it, if it's the only book of that nature that they have read I want to understand what their mental models or their intuitions are regarding how this stuff works.

Plagues and Peoples is the more scholarly of the two, and after it GGS is kinda...redundant.

People forget that it is a feature of democracy that we disagree loudly. Life would be boring otherwise :)

> pre-war German and Japanese

In the November 1932 elections in Germany, the socialist and communists got 221 Reichstag seats to the Nazis 196. 10 of the KPD's seats gained since the July 1932 election were from the socialists - the Nazis helped radicalize German left workers. On February 20, 1933 the CEOs and board members of Germany's Fortune 500 equivalents pledged millions of Marks to the Nazi party, five months later the Vatican signed the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany.

Nothing like that is happening now because there is zero threat from America's working class against the system. It has been losing power with each year, and even college educated professionals have been losing power for decades, something chronicled thirty years ago in "Fear of Falling". There is also no external threat of any historical significance. Fortune 500 boards have no desire to bankroll the efforts of people like Andrew Torba (Y-combinator funded Torba, who did gab.ai, and Paul Graham talks about the genetic intelligence superiority of certain races, but this is not big capital). Trump has been talking about pulling troops home, not about more Lebensraum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_Falling -> "Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich" (sheesh, nowadays books come under the heading "Other", while music and video get their own headers?)

Thanks for the ref, and nice handle btw - these days very few people are allowed to understand that a monarch may be a better deal for them than a senate ...

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

-- Winston Churchill

If art is important to building empathy, our problems might stem from art's recent pivot to shock over beauty and virtue signaling over the cultivation of virtue.

Could you expand on that? We do have a bunch of art influenced by politics (TShirts, Graffitis e.g. the Obama Hope poster, Beto Campaign Tees etc.)

I cannot speak for the parent, but I have some ideas on the matter. if one takes art to mean a narrow group of things with a narrative (specifically film, tv, novels, and radio and news stories, thus specifically excluding things like tshirts and the obama hope poster) then you can start finding examples of works designed to produce shock and contrast them with earlier works intended to invoke beauty. Star Wars is a silly, but relevant, example. the creators of the last jedi specifically wanted to "subvert audience expectations", which sounds likes "shock" to me. Whereas the first original 70s star wars just wanted to tell a good, entertaining story.

To be clear, I don't buy any of the misogynistic criticisms of the last star wars film. but I did think it was a poor story.

my instincts say that such a change in "art" matters, but I don't really have good evidence to show how it does. much less that the arrow of causality points the way I think it does.

When was art about cutivation of virtue? Also, shocking art is quite old ...

I don't know what is meant by the OP, but FWIW, art has traditionally been about beauty and transcendence and elevating the minds of men. That can have the effect of inspiring virtue, I'd say, and can help influence certain sensibilities. Art today is often nihilistic and destructive, obsessed with subverting a world it cannot stand.

I really don't know what you mean by saying art today is nihilistic and destructive. Especially in the realm of pop culture it seems art is obsessed with finding meaning and purpose. The most obvious example that comes to mind is the incredible rise of popularity in super hero movies over the last decade and more. The overarching narrative is literally one where people (the heroes) are finding meaning by fighting to save the world. Then there's music: just looking at the top 3 entries on Billboard, they're all about trying to find love.

Maybe there's nihilism & destruction etc. in some art, but by far it does not appear to be a dominant theme.

> I don't know what is meant by the OP, but FWIW, art has traditionally been about beauty and transcendence and elevating the minds of men. That can have the effect of inspiring virtue, I'd say, and can help influence certain sensibilities.

I would not be so sure. Plenty of art was not like that - purely practical portraits, paintings depicting wars, beheadings, fires and other historical events. Medieval nun with dick tree and running dog eating penis (google it), medieval texts that are about disgusting behavior.

Plenty of old tales are basically about violence with no influence on sensibilities nor much virtues. Even in Homer Odyssey is quite debatable about how much it is virtue inspiring and what kind of virtue.

> Art today is often nihilistic and destructive, obsessed with subverting a world it cannot stand.

Classical books are often depicting destructive and nihilistic characters and caused controversies in their own time for being too close to home.

I won't infer your own political views. I simply want to point out that the phrase "virtue signaling" has been appropriated by conservative factions as some sort of insult. It is used to imply that their liberal counterparts are in some way fraudulent or faking their stated concern for other people or groups of people. This sort of blanket painting of opposing viewpoints as disingenuous lies is exactly the type of thinking the posted article was speaking against.

Yeah often it is used outright to mean "not being a sociopath". You care about people beyond your personal benefits like the plight of minorities? Clearly you must be doing it to look good.

Virtue signaling is by no means a specifically left-wing phenomenon. Consider, for example, copious displays of Christian faith, piety, and family values from divorced cheaters living according to the gospel of fuck-you-I-got-mine. It refers to any instance where the social status game around commitment to a belief / purging of unbelievers dwarfs actual commitment to it.

This is true.

And yet, many "copious displays of Christian faith, piety, and family values," even from some divorced cheaters, as well as the left-wing style, are actually genuine.

Very often, the introduction of the phrase "virtue signaling" comes off as a blanket dismissal of the other party.

Nearly every art movement was in some way shocking to people. Mannerism was somewhat shocking in its exagerations compared to previous renaisance styles. The decadence of the Baroque style similarly discomforted mannerist sensibilities. You can continue to trace this back and forth pattern through the centuries. Rock & Roll is a classic example of art that shocked. And the political overtones of much music in the 60's isn't much different in this respect than today's art that also contains political overtones.

Can you provide some examples?

I have seen the virtues promoted by past art for the purpose. The virtues weren't that great and ammounted to propaganda for the status quo. In fact the "virtues" were often evil in themselves. Roman gladiatorial games are thought of as decadence but the Romans thought they were a measure against it.

The Soviet Union had that sort of "virtue cultivating" art and it sure as hell didn't promote either their "virtures" or actual virtue.

> Whether its American Conservatives or UK Remainers

American liberals do exactly the same thing.

UK remainders are basically american liberals - I think the author put some work into showing both sides of the political spectrum to avoid accusations of bias.

Hah! Well let’s do an experiment. I’m going to give what I think is the point of view of your typical right winger and your typical centrist democrat, and then hopefully someone can educate me as to where I’m wrong. To be clear I’m going to go for the basic profile here. Nuance is for cowards.

Conservatives: I was born in 1948. When I was a young adult, everyone was ok and everything made sense. There was an order to things, everyone had a place. Our great enemy was communism; we had capitalism and were free, while our enemies were communists and lived under dictatorship. I was afraid of communism because communists almost blew up the world, plus we fought them in Vietnam. Communists are bad people and therefore their ideas are bad ideas. I suspect that all liberals are either explicitly communist or are being misled by communist appeals to emotionalism. What we need is a strong rational person who will take charge and root out the people who are getting out of place and ruining things for everyone else.

Centrist liberal: I was born in 1972. When I was a young adult, politics were civil and everyone was polite. I never really paid attention to politics because I thought it was boring. I like my job and I think my boss is a great guy. My favorite political figure was Martin Luther king, because he said that everyone should be nice and get along. I’m not racist, because I like Martin Luther king. I don’t understand why everyone seems so angry these days. Technology is so amazing these days, it’s just going faster and faster. I love buying new fancy things. I think that if we could just elect more democrats to congress, then everyone will be nice again and stop being so nasty to each other.

How’s my empathy? Am I close? I would love it if someone would give a similar treatment to the anarchist/socialist point of view, just so I can see what kinds of silly things people believe about me. Turnabout is fair play. Let me have it.

I think the main flaw is thinking that there is some "typical" person from each group.

But you are close enough to write a few tertiary characters for an Oscar-winning picture. (Though not a main character; those usually develop throughout the movie and don't fit a static description.)

A bit off topic, but I am confused how anarchism and socialism can work together. Can you explain?

Well, first you figure out which genes code for self-interested behavior...

Huh?

State communism is diametrically opposed to anarchist personal freedom, because what are you going to do about the defectors that use their personal freedom to start trading? You have to be able to turn off the "personal freedom" switch once someone starts doing something that, if left unchecked, would switch society to a different form of government. The joke is that if you're not going to do it with police (which would be authoritarian), then you'd have to make it so that the idea "why don't we exchange goods and services," and the idea "why don't we band together to get one up on every other race," and the idea "why don't we start bashing unpopular people's heads in to steal their corn," never even enters into the minds of people who want to climb up higher than everyone else.

Exchanging things for things is fine under anarchism. Exchanging your freedom for money would be bad. The question: how do you keep it from happening without a big nasty authoritarian state? Is a valid one.

In my view there would be 3 safeguards: 1) it would be seen as morally repugnant, like banging your cousin. 2) the other, democratic businesses in the area would just refuse to do business with you 3) in the absence of material want, nobody would feel compelled to sell their labor the way they do now, where they have no real choice. The first thing that happened when England went capitalist in (I think) the 1700’s is that the land that used to be held in common was privatized and people were displaced to the cities, where they had to find jobs. In other words the state deliberately created a situation where people had no choice but to sell their time for money.

In the case of someone accumulating actual weapons and attempting an armed power grab, there would be local citizens militias which would converge on the outbreak of violence and contain it.

Maybe it won’t work, maybe it will, but we won’t know until we try.

>there would be local citizens militias which would converge on the outbreak of violence and contain it.

What if the first step in my evil plan was to gain the loyalty of the local militias by lauding their virtue and advocating that they should receive a bigger cut than everyone else because they're so brave and put themselves in the line of danger? Groups fall to ambitious leaders all the time, because people really eat up a charismatic leader with big promises. (See: how the Legions were talked installing a dictator in Rome.)

I think there are 2 points I would use to respond to that. 1) it’s really, really hard to accumulate a large stockpile of money without exploiting the labor of other people and 2) no political system is immune to a 50% + 1 attack. By “citizens militia” I meant just ordinary people who own weapons so yeah if somebody comes along who is so charismatic that they can convince 50% + 1 people to follow them, it’s game over.

Socialism is a broad term that includes two main branches; state communism, which emphasizes a planned economy, and anarchism, which emphasizes fighting any kind of heirarchy including state power. In an anarchist world all decisions would be made on the local level wherever possible and businesses would be run democratically by their workers.

Anarchists see anarchism as the skill of organizing and working without having people simply follow orders, which if you think about your private life you probably do it all the time. But at work you do what you’re told, which is in our view a gross assault on your personal integrity.

In the anarchist view if there is a large power differential between two people there is simply no way for them to deal fairly with one another. A legal system is just a band-aid. Hoping for nicer rulers is delusional. The solution is that nobody should have that kind of power in the first place. This extends to male power over women and white supremacy as well.

But it’s still considered a branch of socialism, associated with the writings of Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Interesting. It still sounds like you'd need some kind of big state around to constantly hammer down these power dofferentials. And it's not clear how something like that would work in a globalist world. But thank you for a sincere answer.

I do have some overlapping views. Basically I think most cities/communities should be run with center-left-democratic policies, the federal government should be run as libertarian, and states would vary between what we now call Democrats and Republicans. In other words, the nature of government should change depending on the scale. What would I call that viewpoint?

Libertarian, I suppose. I was libertarian until I got my first corporate job, when I realized that every large corporation internally functions just like a Stalinist state. I mean Brezhnev had nothing on corporate America when it comes to bureaucracy..

Ah, well, the nice thing about the current system in the USA is that nobody will stop you from forming a commune. If things were flipped around, with the government being socialist, you couldn't escape that.

No, it isn't perfect. In either case there would be a national government demanding taxes and conscription and not assaulting people, but in your case this is a very minor issue because you're wanting the more-shared option.

Good luck.

>If things were flipped around, with the government being socialist, you couldn't escape that.

I'm curious as to why.

>but in your case this is a very minor issue

I don't think that's true; the state still has power over you and the power to compel you to pay money and live by its (potentially and actually unjust) laws. That's fundamentally opposed to anarchists' goals. The goals of the anarchists aren't only immediately practical (communal production) but long-term practical as well. If one's goal is to eliminate unjust hierarchy (just as the liberal democrat's goal is to eliminate rights violations) then it won't do to live in a few communes here and there. There must be reform of the whole system.

How effective do you really think a democratically run business could be?

Such companies would be very limited in size and capacity to produce output.

If you had a hypothetical Anarchist country with an Anarchist economy where all the companies were run this way, they would all be outcompeted by the capatilist companies of other nations and the local economy would collapse.

Which is why no anarchist (and anarchism necessitates the removal of the state) argues for "anarchism in one country", not only because it's oxymoronic but because it's unworkable for the reasons you mentioned and more.

Well that’s just flat wrong. Here’s an example of an association of worker collectives in Spain known as the Mondragon Corporation which employs 75000 people:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

I mean in the age of feudalism I’m sure people thought the idea of electing their kings would have sounded equally bizarre.

I think you are both touching on the question of "if capitalism is so great, why do firms exist?". You might find the work of Ronald Coase interesting in that regard (see https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/09/07/the-man-who-sho...). The basic idea is that transaction costs for smaller decisions become too high, so it makes sense to have a figure with authority to make certain transaction decisions by fiat. I think Mondragon still has such authority figures, but it has a more "humanist" corporate structure, composed of co-ops, rather than the shareholder-directors-mgmt-and-workers structure in an american c-corp.

corporate structures do matter.

Pretty much. Essentially if you run a thought experiment through several permutations you can roughly compute that this is the case. I always find blowing things up to extremes usually makes certain things come into focus quite well. For example if the organisation has 100,000 people across a multiple geographic regions and then it is discovered that one of the bathrooms have run out of toilet paper, it's not really feasible to call a company all hands meeting to decide who should buy some more toilet paper, where they should buy it from, which brand it should be. If everyone is involved in every decision that pushes productivity to absolute zero the larger the firm grows, though it possibly works for extremely small cases.

By the same token flip the lever hard in the other direction. Imagine management never trusts any expert or IC to ever take a decision on their own. Things get produced but quality plunges abysmally.

There are many configurations things can be in, but from some basic thought experiments you can work out that there is likely a certain operational envelope with a handful of parameters that produce stable, workable results inside the operational envelope and either unstable or unworkable results outside of it.

Some other thought experiments you can try are imagine a world in which no one is trustworthy. Well, it's close to impossible to do business because you have to spend so long figuring out who to do business with that you can't do business with anyone. Imagine a world where nobody ever cheats you and always presents an accurate, trustworthy description of what transaction will take place. Business flies along because you can do away with a lot of overhead that goes in to accounting for that stuff. So it seems trust is an important parameter. Firms make sense from the perspective of having people available (you can trust you have resources to meet demand) and who you trust to be able to complete the work. If you have to go to market every time you can't necessarily guarantee the company you are doing business with will stay in business or keep you as a client or any number of things. So there's a trade-off being made there and there are certain inflection points where on choice stops making sense and another one starts.

Just thinking about it now it seems that the parameters include, but at not necessarily limited to:

  communication bandwidth/overhead
  trust
  alignment of incentives

Well that's an interesting data point. Ray Dalio's Principles is another interesting data point on an alternative way to run an organization. These seem to me variations on a similar theme though.

They don't at all make the case for anarchy. The hierarchies are still there and still necessary.

Hey I’m kind of perplexed, everything I wrote in the parent comment is factual information about what anarchists believe, why the downvotes? If you don’t believe me you can look it up:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

Downvoting facts just because you don’t like them says more about you than about me, does it not?

>just so I can see what kinds of silly things people believe about me.

Ok, I'll give it a shot.

Anarchist/Socialist/Anarcho-Capitalist: A lot of my friends support this fringe political position, and they seem cool and well-esteemed within my social circles. Everyone can list a thousand reasons why Republicans or Democrats are corrupt and stupid, and to think of it I don't really know a single person at my university that wholeheartedly supports the platform of either one. I trust the negative things I hear about parties a lot more than the positive things I hear about them, and because the news has never even mentioned the group I consider myself a part of, we're miles ahead of everyone else. To be honest, I don't really see how Democrats or Republicans manage to choose their beliefs, except by imitating each other for social reasons. Any real argument I hear in favor of anything comes across as a rapturous epiphany, because for the first 18 years of my life until now I have only seen other people choosing their beliefs by copying each other for social reasons. I'm so glad that I managed to break free from that system; I'm having a great time visiting the local anarchist bookstore for their special events, and I'm going steady with a girl/guy I met there. My newfound relationships really motivate me to keep up with the literature.

Love it! A few things wrong though: I was introduced to socialism in my 30’s after thinking socialist type thoughts for years and believing I was all alone. I’m married and my wife is not so far to the left as me; but we’ve both moved farther left after we got hitched. I do have lots of friends who think more or less this way. I understand that capitalism also has things it does well, and worry about how socialism can replicate those successes (and if it should even try).

>Whether its American Conservatives or UK Remainers, much of the political spectrum has an inability to consider the other side's opinion

I would caution the author against merely dismissing this behavior as a defect in their thinking. I suspect that some or most of the lack of empathy is intentional.

Aside: In my view, most people who espouse political views merely parrot bits and pieces of arguments that they have seen elsewhere, so I ignore these "non-thinkers" as I don't believe that they contribute much to the empathy or lack thereof in today's politics.

Back to my point: I think that apathy is often a strategic advantage, especially in politics. The ideological leaders of the groups know this and choose to employ narratives that paint their opponents as evil monsters rather than misled humans, as it makes their jobs significantly easier.

For example, being the political party who sets aside the traditions of the government to, for example, fast-track the nomination of a high-value judge by changing the rules, confers a great advantage to whoever is willing to cross the line first.

In today's democracies the winner of an election is mainly determined by who can stir up the most support from their large preexisting base of supporters. In this system the most attention grabbing rhetoric wins, and empathy just doesn't seem to get the kind of attention that vitriol does.

As for dealing with apathy in politics, I am skeptical of the idea that there is much to do other than remove the advantage that apathy provides, which itself seems very difficult. Promoting empathetic arts seems noble, but I doubt that it would even slow the current trend we see playing out on social media.

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