TIL Heroes tend to just be well-adjusted people who learned to feel empathy as children, often from caring and patient parents
TIL Heroes tend to just be well-adjusted people who learned to feel empathy as children, often from caring and patient parents
A page from The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley
I guess it's not exactly surprising, but it seems to explain a lot of things I'm witnessing in my later adulthood. I've always felt deeply impressed by selfless heroes, but I never really pondered the profile of heroism.
But… I’m confused. Didn’t Musk call empathy a weakness? Surely someone so tolerant, inclusive, and humble couldn’t be wrong.
Fucking hell. I can't escape being reminded of this shitstain everywhere, even if I filter political posts.
People like musk are afraid of heroes
Empathy being a sign of privilege isn't the truth I needed to read today :/
In a weird way, having emotionally available and supportive parents is absolutely a privilege. People are able to develop empathy in spite of bad parents, and good parenting isn't a guarantee to a good person, but parenting is a major factor for life success. I wish it weren't, and I hope we can build a society that could guarantee every child full opportunities.
When you are fighting to survive, it's only normal to have less bandwidth to care for others.
That's the irony of it. I'm by no means a scholar of Thich Nhat Hanh, but I remember reading an account from his early life as a Vietnamese monk during the conflict with imperial France in which he had basically nothing and was himself barely surviving, but still found a way to feel peace and express compassion for a young French soldier suffering from malaria who desperately raided the monastery at gunpoint.
The opposite I feel, we are stronger as a group and my instinct when shit hits the fan is to make sure everyone involved is ok and ready to face the challenge together
Luckily, it is the kind of privilege you can pass on to your children.
You don't have to have any other privileges for that. Just patience and love (yep, not easy, but doable by all means)
How is it privilege?
My parents were fucking great. Not the best but damn it they did the best they could with what they were handed. I can see how it could be considered a privilege.
Not everyone has good parents
It makes perfect sense to me that people who suffer abuse or neglect when young would develop a deep-rooted drive to look out for themselves first and foremost. It would be (literally, socially, and emotionally) a survival mechanism. Unfortunately, it would leave less room than others might have for empathy.
I don't imagine this would ever go away completely, even if their situation improved by adulthood.
There's some truth here, like poorly-treated children probably have difficulty with empathy, except I've known a few people that had very hard childhoods and are some of the kindest people I've ever met, as if they developed past those issues to understand how important empathy is.
I also come from a large family, and while my siblings and my cousins had very similar upbringings, the variability in things like empathy and justice is extensive even among siblings (notably including twins).
To me it seems like there's a strong element of innate character trait with this stuff, as we've watched kids grow up and seen their character at 2 years old remain consistent into adulthood. If this stuff were driven mostly by environment, then at least most kids would be similar... And we've found they aren't, it's all over the map, unpredictable by the environment.
Not to say environment doesn't/can't influence, it certainly can, but I don't believe it's usually the primary driver, just in cases where the environment is notably negative
There very well could be something innate. Later in the chapter, Ripley writes about heroes who did what they did because they felt they wouldn't have been able to live with the sense of cowardice for not acting. The fear of future self loathing overpowered their fear of present peril.
As for nurture vs. nature origins of empathy, I'm looking forward to watching Boarding On Insanity.
Some people when faced with struggle become cold and bitter: "If I got through it without help, so can they."
Some people do the opposite : "That was a hell I suffered through that I don't want anyone else to have to experience"
And I have spent my entire life trying to figure out the difference between those two kinds of people and wondering which type I truly am.
This book is fantastic as a whole. Highly recommend.
I had asshole impatient parents (two of them), and I was like that. After I moved out, I had to learn empathy.
Ive been in a few emergency situations at- and outside-of work, and I'm always told that I'm a great leader who is calm and quick to act effectively.
My point is that empathy and leadership isnt dependent on parents.
Not entirely, and you did a great job of overcoming that. But learning empathy and really anything is easiest as a child and the parents are the best avenue for that.
What kinds of things did you consciousnessly and intentionally do to train yourself into a healthier and more empathic frame of mind? Did you naturally gravitate toward a vocation requiring calm decisiveness under pressure in dynamic and unpredictable situations?
I can't say it was intentional. I never set out to become more empathetic. It was just that, as I began to navigate the world on my own, I realized how selfish and wrong was my thinking about the world and the people i met.
I learned that eating animals was a major cause of the climate catastrophe shortly after moving from my patents house, and so I became vegetarian and many of my friends were vegan. My initial motivation for this was mostly still selfish, since its still in my personal interest to avoid climate catastrophe. But obviously many of my peers were veg for more empathetic reasons.
Also at Uni many of my friends were poorer than me. So being exposed to poor vegan friends showed me a lot of what I wasn't taught by my parents (empathy).
And then I went traveling, and I was amazed at how kind most strangers I met were. We're taught to live in fear and that others want to hurt us, but I found most strangers wanted to help. And those who have less generally give more than rich folks.
As for work, I've worked as a sysadmin. It can be high stress when things break and you're called-in to fix it. Its important to have a cool head. I've also done a lot of trekking, sometimes in sketchy situation. I think the leader attribute might be more my nature, whereas empathy was learned (or, maybe, being a selfish asshole was unlearned)