I hope this is not gonna end up being a philosophical treaty, if it does I do apologize.
This burst of ideas and inspiration was triggered by looking at the comments on one of those sites about politics and economic crisis etc. It was amazing to see all these extreme reactions from people ( most of whom have absolutely no idea about the topic; I don`t either-to be sure), it looked like they were not talking about the same thing. So, even if most of us agree that color blue is color blue, when it comes to more complex topics we seem to disagree on every possible point. Why is that? Why couldn't it be simpler? Isn`t there one best way to lead a country ( who needs all these political parties )? If there is one way, what it is?
The point I am trying to make is, We are all different. Born in different places, raised in different ways of different religions and ideologies. And this seems to make us see certain things and perceive certain ideas but also blinds us to the rest of them. Well, this is all normal you might say and I would agree with you. The problems is when we think everyone else should think like us, see things the same way we do. Obviously, this is not possible.
But we are not alone in this. The funny thing is we are all the same in differentiation ( horibble sentence )!
What I was trying to say is, the fact we are each different should make us more tolerant towards each other,
Symphatize with all kinds of strange responses we get from people and just once ask ourselves;
"What made them like that?"
What made us who we are?
Someone taught me once that humans beings are driven by sympathy, not empathy, it might seem like a small difference between the two but when it comes to complex topics such as the ones you were mentioning before it actually becomes quite relevant, let me explain.
ReplyDeleteFirstly lets define what sympathy and empathy are, sympathy is the act of seeing yourself (how would you act) if you were placed in a different persons situation, and empathy, is the act of imagining how that person would react to the circumstances he or she is in.
Now, as you mentioned earlier, for simple concepts human beings tend to think alike (blue is blue and there is no way you can disagree on that), but, for more complex ones, such as politics or philosophy, each individual has a different way of interpreting them, not only that, but as most of people are mainly driven by sympathy they cannot entirely grasp that concept (i.e. they assume what seems obvious to them is obvious to other people as well and as other people need to think using the paths that the subject in question uses, he only needs to clarify them). In my experience those rants you were talking about, arise mainly from this phenomenon, people not being able to understand each other.
Empathy actually requires a lot of understanding of another person, and you need to realize that the little information given in a written text might be many times too scarce, that is probably why those kind of rants happen more on the internet than if people are speaking face to face.
But that is just a theory.
You seem to know about this subject! I was looking for someone like that :)
ReplyDeleteI could not agree more with you saying Emphaty requires a lot of understanding. What I am really interested in is how do we raise our level of emphaty or even, just be aware of it?
And the notion about the internet, I think, is quite important because it drastically changed the way humans communicate with each other...
I don`t mean the technological part of it, it is the fact people dare to say more to the computer:) and are more open to tell very personal information on Facebook, for example.
It seems liberating! but it might well have consequences on their interactions in so called "real life".
What do you think?