When empathy is lost, we lose ourselves

Gandhi said, “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty”.

You know what I realized? I’m tired – tired of all the name calling, and you-too-ism, and “both sides” ism, and this person’s horrible but this other person who did the exact same thing is just fine because they are on “my side”.

I do believe in calling out injustice, and shining light onto darkness, and that truth should vanquish evil – in a perfect world. But our world is not perfect, and our world is not black-and-white.

Humans are incredibly complex creatures – they are never just one thing, no matter how much we might like to put them into a box with a label on it. The most important things about any human are not their politics, their religion, their gender identity, their race, their social status – all of those are just the ingredients in the soup that makes up each person. And each person’s soup is subtly and wildly different from every other person’s.

I went through an obsessive phase the last few months, with following the news online and Twitter constantly – refreshing over and over, wanting to know the latest thing the instant it happened. I realized this was all tied to politics and me wanting to see somebody I find distasteful “lose” or see the people I hold up “win”.

But you see, any time our primary motivation for any of our emotions is that we want to see somebody “lose”, then those emotions are misguided. All we are doing is hoping for the next moment of schadenfreude, where we can take delight in somebody else’s pain. I’m not saying that some people don’t deserve that failure, or that pain – they do – but I’m starting to see that we have all been trained to seek that failure and pain of others out.

There’s a lot of blame for this to spread around, but a whole, whole lot of it has to be placed on social networks and media companies. If these companies have learned anything in the last decade, it is that anger and discord drives traffic on their sites – do we really think that Facebook has any intention of really working at removing hate speech and fake news from their site, when they are making billions in revenue from people clicking on the inflammatory stories and memes in their feeds? Do we really think networks like CNN and FoxNews will stop airing divisive stories, when those stories consistently get the highest ratings?

As a people, we are constantly being fed media that appeals to our lowest emotions – wanting to see “others” who are “not like us” fail, or be marginalized, or be ejected from society or our country.

I’m not just talking about the obvious binaries like white vs. not white, religious vs. not, red vs. blue – I’m talking about how this has evolved in the last few years. Today, the divisions that used to be painted in broad strokes have all become very personal 1:1 relationships. I think somebody in my family is stupid because of their political views. One of my friends thinks I’m stupid because of my viewpoint on religion. My neighbor thinks my other neighbor is stupid because of their views on gender.

It wasn’t always like this – but social networks have made everybody’s views on everything so in our face, that we all now engage in this constant game of outrage – mostly fueled by a small percentage of individuals who like to light a match and see something burn. I honestly believe that most people just don’t care that much, that they’d much rather just get on with their normal everyday lives – but they are also addicted to checking into their online feed, and their network news, and they are fed something newly outrageous all over again.

Media companies are thriving on that outrage right now – they are all generating record revenues because of it. I guess what this is all coming to is, this is something I like that is different about our home here – on Open Diary, we listen to each other, and respect each other, and treat each other first as the complicated human beings that we are. We don’t just automatically put somebody in a box, or on a “side” based on what we think we know about the other person.

Media (and especially social media) reinforces this behavior into an endless loop. We get “likes” if we post something inflammatory that appeals to our friends (who share our viewpoint), followed by others jumping on our bandwagon or us jumping on theirs, because it feels good to get noticed and appreciated. Posting inflammatory memes on Facebook triggers the same base human emotions as posting our vacation pictures on Instagram – we are doing it so other people will notice, and like it, and maybe share it with their friends. The resulting satisfaction from having our thing get appreciation is the same in any case.

All of this just encourages us to continue the bad behavior, and encourages us to contribute to the pain of others for the gain of ourselves. I’m not trying to be preachy, or make a point about any particular person or group – I’ve done the same things, and felt rewarded when I see others fail, or lifted up when I see others fall.

There is so much good in the world of humans. There are so many wonderful things that people do every day for each other. I only wish these were the things that we would be seeing in our media, instead of what we currently see. We all need to believe that most humans are good people at their core – we are all just trying to get through life the best we can – and that the evil and outrage that is pushed in front of us every day, those are the outliers.

All of us need to re-learn the beauty of empathy. We need to look at the beautiful parts of the ocean, not the few dirty drops.