this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
323 points (99.4% liked)
AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND
3104 readers
2 users here now
This is a page for anything that's amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound.
♦ ♦ ♦
RULES
❶ Each player gets six cards, except the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven.
❷ Posts, comments, and participants must be amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound.
❸ This page uses Reverse Lemmy-Points™, or 'bad karma'. Please downvote all posts and comments.
❹ Posts, comments, and participants that are not amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound will be removed.
❺ This is a non-smoking page. If you must smoke, please click away and come back later.
❻ Don't be a dick.
Please also abide by the instance rules.
♦ ♦ ♦
Can't get enough? Visit my blog.
♦ ♦ ♦
Please consider donating to Lemmy and Lemmy.World.
$5 a month is all they ask — an absurdly low price for a Lemmyverse of news, education, entertainment, and silly memes.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't understand the perspective you're coming-from.
True empathy is where one totally-understands another's experience/perspective, & one "is one with" their condition/experiencing.
It isn't that it makes you feel good to do that, or even to be able to do that: it's just wired in, an innate-muscle of mind ( the mirror-neuron system, which seems to be broken in psychopaths ).
Why would being pierced by another's grieving make one feel good to be doing?
Honest empathy isn't self-serving.
It is overwhelming.
_ /\ _
Empathy is absolutely not inherent. It is a learned skill and not even most people have it. But either way it should be obvious how being able to better relate to those you socialize with would be beneficial to you.
Empathy is dependent-on mirror-neuron-system: without that working, you're a psychopath, from what I can see.
The more mirror-neuron-function, the greater the pressure to be in empathy.
Claiming that it's a learned-skill to me seems backwards:
sociopathy's a learned-skill, culturally.
Empathy's the natural-default.
Show me a chimp-mom not having empathy for her baby/toddler..
It's non-empathy which has to be enforced, at the whole-population scale, to change/imprint/configure that population.
The people who after being in the Soviet Union said things like "we weren't sociopathic, before", back this.
_ /\ _
Source for that?
Source for that? Buddy sociopathy is an anti-social dysfunction because we are evolutionarily social animals. Sociopathy is counter to that evolutionary paradigm hence dysfunction, not standard operating procedure.
On the other hand we're incredibly tribalistic, from anthropology and sociology we learn the average person only really has the capacity to personally care for about a hundred people, and we generally automatically empathize to some degree with that specific in-group. But we do not automatically empathize with those not in our in-group. If we did, we wouldn't be tribalistic to the degree that we are and issues like caste systems or racial discrimination wouldn't be the incredibly prominent issues they still are today.
Genuine empathy, the ability to conceptualize and more or less "feel" the emotions from the contextual lived experiences of others, is absolutely a learned trait. I think you're confusing empathy with sympathy which is very different. Anyone can feel sympathetic, but if all humans were inherently empathetic then war wouldn't exist. It couldn't by virtue of everyone being able to experience empathetically the utter horror of war.