this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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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.
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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.