Why Authoritarians think Empathy is the Enemy

 by John MacBeath Watkins

I have defined politics as the process by which our individual moral sense becomes the rules we all must live by. Personally, my moral sense is defined, more than anything, by empathy. I am distressed by the suffering of others, and I think causing people to suffer is a bad thing. But sometimes people think it is moral to impose suffering. 

Most of us have empathy (psychopaths excluded) and this informs our moral sense. Some are balanced more toward a moral sense informed by the attitudes they learned growing up. They may regard whole groups as evil. All of us have some element of this – who has any sympathy for sadists, or for people who abuse children? – but some large percentage of us are more wedded to traditional rules and less inclined to allow our empathy to overcome such feelings. Many of my gay friends were kicked out of the house when their parents learned that they were gay, because gay people were traditionally considered evil, and their parents (well, usually their fathers) could not abide a family member they regarded as evil.

If you can convince your followers that your opponents belong to an evil group, you can exploit this often emotional response to the violation of traditional mores to tie them more firmly to your movement. This is why the Q anon movement was so eager to convince its followers that liberals were doing terrible things to children. When Adolph Hitler cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his speeches and in Mein Kampf, The fraudulent nature of the Protocols was well known, but the Nazis found the lie useful. When you wish to drum up tribalism and make people feel united by defining the boundaries of the group through setting some people outside of it, such lies are useful.

From my perspective, as a person whose moral sense is informed by empathy, people whose moral sense is informed mostly by the attitudes they learned growing up mistake personal prejudice for moral clarity. From their perspective, I'm a woke pansy who doesn't know what evil looks like.

For the authoritarian, empathy is the enemy, because people might identify with the suffering of individuals consigned to the torturable class. If you want people to feel part of the in-group, any feelings of empathy with the out-groups undermines your efforts, and may cause an outbreak of humanity and toleration.

If your claim is that gay people are evil and must be punished for violating social norms, the very acts of cruelty to them bind together the group oppressing them. If you have been cruel to someone because they are outside of social norms, you can only justify this to yourself if those you have been cruel to are evil.

They can only justify their actions because belonging to the group makes it right, and they cannot defect from the group without making themselves subject to similar oppression, and acknowledging that they have been cruel to someone without cause.

If someone says, 'I don't know what you've got against homosexuals, they've always been very sweet to me,' authority has lost a hold on them. Next, they will be consorting with bohemians, that is, the sort of people authority wishes to condemn, gypsies, tramps and thieves, but also rebel poets.