we're all gradually losing our empathy
humanity is losing it's empathy and leading us down a scary future
Love is often regarded as the highest virtue
love thy neighbour, love thy enemy, love this, love that, pauls entire letter on love, love among other fruits of the spirit and how this one virtue can birth others, placing it at the top, but i strongly disagree.
Love ?
yes it's important but love is not the most fundamental virtue, love has flaws, love in some cases can come and go, as humans you can actually hate someone, as much as you preach love and try to love there is space for hate in the heart and this doesn't make you less human, you're just as human as everyone else.
Empathy is different.
you can hate someone and still understand their pain. you can disagree with someone and still recognize their humanity. you can wish to never see a person again and still feel a knot in your stomach when something terrible happens to them.
Empathy survives where love often fails.
In many ways, empathy is the soil from which every other virtue grows. kindness becomes possible because we understand suffering. gentleness emerges because we recognize vulnerability. patience develops because we understand that people struggle. even love itself often begins with empathy. from centuries of the human empathy being in practice, consitutional laws have constructed and saved us from all sort of crime.
but empathy is evolutionary just like humans, it grows and and it shrinks.
but right now it's constantly shrinking, we're fast losing it.
not suddenly, but gradually.
the exposure to soo much evil, the standardization of wickedness, hatred becoming a norm, is making us tolerant to our loss of empathy and this is becoming obvious in almost everyone i meet in person and those i observe online. we're losing this ability to emotionally understand what other people are feeling and ultimately i think it's what is going to drive us to an end. if you can understand the concept of another humans in pain, if you can in some way imagine yourself in their place hatred would be harder to enact, this is why the absence of empathy is so dangerous. It allows people to reduce others into objects, statistics, obstacles, or enemies.
the end of empathy might not look like hatred, it might just be indifference.
that's a scary future if you ask me.