 So hi, I'm Edwin Rutch and this is Dialogues on How to Build a Culture of Empathy and today I'm here with Sam Vaknen. Is that my pronouncing it right again? We've Yeah, so you're kind of a spokesperson for psychopaths. You've been diagnosed as a psychopath three times diagnosed maybe more by now and you're kind of been you've written a book Malignant self-love And it's about narcissism and psychopathy and you've talked about a lot about empathy written about empathy on your Website, I just saw there's this great documentary out there about you now So you're really doing a lot around the the topic of psychopath the narcissism and empathy is there something and What we want to do in this discussion is talk about at least initially is talk about the Paul Bloom article which is Which was in the New Yorker the main New Yorker? called the baby in the well the case against empathy and So before we kind of start is there more you'd like to say Sam about just introducing yourself Well, you said everything that's there's there is saying I Just not a nitpick, but I've been diagnosed as a psychopathic narcissist. That's a variant of narcissism which also has the Psychopathic traits, so I'm essentially a narcissist, but I have pronounced the prominent psychopathic traits Just like safe side of psychiatry. Yeah, yeah, just to be clear on the definitions and so forth Yeah, and we had done an interview once before already a recorded interview was a Skype interview just the audio So we've talked a lot about you and and the work you're doing so we wanted to talk about was the Paul Bloom article and I thought we could maybe you know doesn't have to be really in-depth but you know he starts the discussion off saying the Barack Obama has talked extensively about Empathy and he has a couple quotes in there that he starts it off with and and that's actually quite accurate because I've been tracking Barack Obama's comments about empathy and he's he's mentioned at least 70 80 times in books in his book and interviews and in his speeches, so What do you think about that to kind of start with just in terms of Barack Obama, you know and empathy Every day Kato, so there's a buzzword catchphrase panacea sort of the medicine that we cure all social and cultural ills and today Barack Obama is writing the crest of Empathy so empathy is now the buzzword the key word and There is a prevalent belief that should empathy spread or should be should it be applied and implemented more widely or should it be taught Should it be should people go through empathy education or reeducation and so on so forth Then many of the social cultural geopolitical and political ills and financially it's that we are all suffering Will will vanish literally overnight. It's a bit of a Bit of a naive way of looking at things and that's I think that's precisely what Paul Bloom is trying to say Okay, so you're saying that there's a there's these buzzwords that come within the culture I'm gonna do a little bit of empathic reflection here if that's okay with you that you're saying that there is like these These buzzwords that come in the society and right now empathy is sort of one of these buzzwords people think it's going to solve all the social ills And that Barack Obama is kind of writing the crest of that wave and and you're feeling that Paul Bloom is kind of addressing that addressing that in his article It's a meme, you know meme Empathy is a meme so it's the current post-modern meme, you know things are so bad we apply a lotion of empathy We solve our ones with empathy and the one will will be not even scar tissue But I think it's it's a pretty naive way of looking at things Oh, and so you're also seeing that there's a naive atta about that That it's not kind of a naive way of looking at that so yeah Well, I would say that you know doing as a director of the Center for Building a culture of empathy That's kind of my mission in life is to really build a culture of empathy and and to actually foster empathy So I'm really glad to you know have this dialogue with you about the role of empathy in society and Since I am coming from that That role that that position that if we foster it it will really address a lot of the social ills that we have so so So then the next thing Paul gets into is the definition of empathy, you know he talks about Empathy coming from the German word Einfühlung, you know feeling into and then he kind of talks about Adam Smith Who in more in the theory of moral sentiments talks about sympathy but addresses kind of some of the qualities of? empathy and Part of it being where does he say here? You know he talks about that if use if you see someone I think like a beggar that you will and it has sores that you will start itching because you feel the sores you know because you're kind of having that empathic connection he called it sympathy and He had some other kind of stories like that if you're somebody's on a On a you know on a tightrope or something they're balancing I think that you can kind of feel yourself in their position kind of balancing so in in terms of The definition of empathy what kind of were you around that? Einfühlung in the German term Einfühlung was invented within the theory of aesthetics Actually, I'm feeling was meant to explain why people who view art and interact with art are That are the experience emotions. How come art provokes emotions in spectators and viewers and so on The art is an object. How can an object achieve it? So the Germans invented the term Einfühlung And in the sense that the art objects somehow Infiltrates the psyche and provokes innate emotions, so it has very little to do with empathy It was part of the aesthetic experience of art But empathy empathy is an as as you well know probably better than me Empathy is an umbrella term. It's an overarching kind of Word that describes a series of abstract concepts as well as psychological constructs When all these are put together we get the net outcome is what we call Empathy but empathy involves many many elements many many processes and This is precisely the reason that narcissists and psychopaths cannot empathize because many of these Elements and processes and triggers are missing with narcissism and psychopaths Generally, there is I believe the the main question as far as empathy goes is this When we experience empathy Do we put ourselves in someone else's place? Do we project ourselves into the other person and thereby everything that everything that we emote Everything that we feel is actually our feelings not that person's feeling So is empathy a projection or is empathy an Intrajection we take the other person's feelings and so on so forth we sort of import them tax free and we experience them This is I think this is the main divide This is the main debate debate between the major schools of psychology which deal with empathy Some of them say that actually empathy is an impossibility that all that's happening is that we are conditioned in the process of socialization To experience certain emotions in response to certain stimuli Certain sights certain sounds and smells certain Events and so what we do is we project and then the other school says no, that's not true We learn it's a learning process empathy is an acquired thing and so we learn to identify in other people emotions and psychological processes that we then appropriate and Apprehend via identifications or interjections and we really feel what the other guy is feeling So there is a debate about this, but there is I think one fact That sort of raises very serious questions With regards to empathy and that is the fact that infants even as young as six months old Show distinct signs of empathic reactions They're their facial features change if for instance mother cries They react in a completely different way If people around them are sad or if people around them are happy So we have empathic reactions clear and distinct and we're substantiated in what research empathic reactions in infants Yet at the age of six months old No infant knows what it means to be said and no infant knows what we assume that no infant knows Really knows what is the meaning of emotions full-fledged I don't emotions So infants are reacting not because they know how the other person feels But they seem to be reacting reflexively reflexively as a kind of instinct and That seems to indicate that empathy is indeed more of a projection than an introduction It's not that we feel what the other person is going through. It's that we are triggered to the other person Processes and emotions that are happening inside us so the you're talking about the The early definition of empathy the I feel long which was in art Where the idea is that you kind of project your feelings into the art and then you're kind of and then that Definition is kind of evolved to this notion of that we kind of feel our way Into the emotions of others. So there's this there's kind of two ways How does the empathy really work? Is it a projection or is it a kind of a feeling into the experience of others and and that? that For me it's as I understand it. It's through mirror neurons But as I see you moving or you see my hands moving that you have mirror neurons You're shaking your head, you know that I can feel my neurons for shaking my head or are firing So that I'm feeling within myself the experience and I can see you kind of holding your hands like this and I can kind of my that My body kind of simulates Your experience that you're doing and that and in that way I can get a sense of the quality of your experience of your Physical experience which is also connected to the emotional experience. So your head is shaking kind of you know I had a certain rate if it was going like this, you know really fast Then I would have a feeling of high intensity emotions Versus kind of just a slow kind of a ponderous kind of a shaking of your head so that's a so it seems to me that those two projection and Feeling into can both happen that it's not one or the other that both of those states of being can kind of happen that I can Kind of just project something on to you like hey I'm feeling cold. So you must be cold You know kind of thing or the other would be is seeing you kind of shivering feeling my body shivering and saying Oh, I'm feeling that you're you're perhaps You know cold Even if you even if mirror neurons do operate as they're supposed to operate it's still go Mirrored yes, something that's happening in you. It's it's still projection It's something that you experience you are experiencing your mirror neurons. So you're interpreting So we must make a distinction between the base experience of empathy and the interpretation or reframing that we super impose on what we feel So there you may interpret it as though you are, you know, you're interjecting as though you are actually experiencing my emotions or my Experience but but the fact is that whatever happens happens in the confines of your mind. Yeah, and we had this debate before and I My advice the viewers to refer to our previous interview We have this debate was quite fierce and furious if I remember correctly Where we Where we try we try to discuss what is known in philosophy as the inter subjectivity agreement in philosophy That's a basic question. How can I know? What's going on in your head? How can I know that your kind of sadness is my kind of sadness? How can I know that if I prick you with a pin? And you experience pain and I prick myself with a pain and experience pain How can I know that my pain is your pain? How can I make this equation and there is it's known as the inter subjectivity agreement problem and the idea is that people reach some kind of unspoken Agreement as to what constitutes pain or what constitutes love or what constitutes sadness and so on But the veracity of this agreement cannot be objectively verified. It's a totally arbitrary agreement We just agree that if I stick a pin in myself or a new we are bound or likely to experience an identical To have an identical experience, but there's no way to prove it of course We can we can demonstrate physical physiological correlates. We can show certain bioelectrical Conduction and we can show certain a certain flow of blood in the brain through functional MRI We can show physiological correlates of the experience and they may even be the same with you and with me It still doesn't say anything about the subjective content of this objective phenomenon Blood may flow to the same area in your brain as it does in mind And yet there's no way of proving that I'm experiencing this blood flow as you're experiencing this blood flow So there's a major problem in in and Wittgenstein and other philosophers. They they coined the term Private language. We are all prisoners within our mind and we are all using Essentially private languages. We're trying to build bridges all the time and one of the major bridges is of course empathy Empathy is an attempt to build a bridge by a very least by way of projection Saying you're equal to me and if something is happening to you you're bound to feel the same way I do as bad as I do as good as I do and so if you feel as bad as I do I owe you consideration I owe your compassion. I would like to give you a compassion even if I don't owe you compassion, you know, so but it's all built on Not a very firm foundation as far as rigorous Philosophy is, you know the logic and it's built on and I'll be through agreement Mm-hmm. So the the empathy in terms of feeling knowing that you're feeling what another person is you can't really prove that You're saying you can't prove that I'm feeling what you're feeling or that you know, we do something called empathic listening around the You know kind of a space a lot on the work of Carl Rogers who in his therapy did this reflective listening and It's like one person will share their experience and then it's reflected back by the other and You know, you're kind of guessing you're kind of saying well Here's what I'm kind of saying. So you're doing a bit of an error check It's a little bit like I don't know if you know computer packet switching how it works You send data No, and then there's some and then there's like, you know, you kind of check the data A checksum check some and then you're saying, you know, am I getting this right? This is what I'm getting so you have a little bit of a check some kind of experience with the empathic listening And then that kind of helps the person kind of feel that they're kind of being heard You know, but it's a lot of times you're wrong. You say, you know, you say hey This is what I'm hearing is this right and they'll say no, that's not what I'm saying What I'm saying is this so there's a little bit I think that what Carl Rogers did was have that create that works around that checksum and there's something about that that mirroring of that reflection that helps with that Interest subjective that subjective understanding you feel like you actually are getting closer to someone else We are we're all faced with a major problem. We have to use language Language is a very limited tool. We would like to believe that it's not but actually it's a very limited tool Anyone who has read Zen Buddhist text Or Zen Buddhist Treatments of language would would agree. It's a language is arbitrary. It's the meaning of language is is in flux That people don't usually agree Even on the meaning of totally objective words Language also does not represent usually Anything that is any anything that is identifiable versus if I say table which table Table your table my table so language is a very very limited and problematic to And so not only do we have a problem on the subjective level? But we also have a problem in on the communication level on the objective level of exchanging information And this is a problem of all therapists, but especially Rogers empathy therapy, you know empathy education therapy That's a but I think Paul The problem in his essay the problem was you know in his essay was dealing with the In my view it is an entirely different issue He was dealing with the application of empathy in the public sphere in the sphere of policy making Oh before before we before we get to that. Let's I was gonna try to be a little systematic So, um, all right, so I really want to get into that because I think that's really interesting So it's you know, he talks about that empathy is instinctive Mirroring he talks about James Bond getting his testes mashed in casino Royale and that you know Ouch So that's the first thing then he said he talks about Adam Smith talking about the delicate fibers of the you know Seeing the beggar's sore that you start itching so that you know He's just making the point that this happens the empathy happens through mirroring and then he talks about Daniel Batson and the empathy altruism hypothesis He says Batson has found that simply instructing subjects to take another person's perspective makes them more caring and more likely to help So that if you so he's doing the mirroring you know, which is maybe through mirror neurons notion and then the that if you take someone's perspective like I take your Perspective I imagine myself in your situation that that kind of makes through that Daniel Batson's work that people want to contribute more and then he goes into The research that he says empathy research is thriving these days There's a lot of research going on and the idea is that with the research if you can understand empathy We can see why people have low empathy and then we can address those problems So and then he goes into why is there low empathy and then there's a series of Reasons so up till now. I just wonder if anything's coming up for you around what you've heard so far Well only the context of narcissism Psychopaths, it's a very interesting question whether if empathy can be learned if it can be acquired Then the major the pillar of narcissism and psychopathy can be eroded. I mean If empathy can be learned and acquired The vast majority of manifestations of narcissism and psychopathy will have vanished We're vanish. I mean The lack of empathy underlines most of the psychodynamic processes in narcissism and psychopathy It is the crux and the crucible of narcissism and psychopathy I Personally, I am invested in the perhaps invested in the notion that Narcissism and psychopathy are incurable It would be a major financial disaster for me I Just interviewed someone recently about this article and I mentioned you and He says oh, it's amazing someone can make a life You know it make it make a career out of being a psychopathetic narcissist So he was he was saying that's amazing that that could happen in this world. So it's exactly what you're addressing I made a career not only of being a psychopathetic narcissist, but of studying And talking and so a bit of a difference, but but really When time comes I mean you give me the cue we can discuss narcissism and psychopaths and try to see why Why there are why in my view at least they are unable to fill empathy and why it would surprise me mightily If in their case at the very least empathy could be learned or acquired So there's this whole question of his empathy Can you you know study it and learn how to raise or lower it? And you're kind of thinking that psychopaths and narcissists are kind of like maybe born that way and it's like You know it's kind of hope it is born or born in the middle of nature Yeah, nature It's both It's both probably us But I do I do think that there is a percentage of a population whether it's one percent as bloom says or whatever There's a percentage of a population that is beyond empathy That is not amenable to empathy that is unable to acquire empathy And I think this has to do with very very complex psychological processes and constructs That underlie narcissism and psychopathy and we will be able to discuss that later. I should you wish on it? So yeah, that's right because he actually goes into he goes into next. Why is there low empathy and he says one ideologies? The people create these political and religious ideologies and that kind of this, you know a distance then says them You know the Christians versus You know the Muslims or or you know Fascists versus fascism versus communism. So there's these ideologies that create differences then he goes into bad genes That you know you have abusive parroting brutal experiences And he's tying that in with the psychopathy which you're talking about there's And then there's evil is empathy erosion so he goes into the work of Simon Baron Cohen who talks about you know empathy erosion that Evil is just another way of talking about evil would be is to call it a lack of empathy or or Empathy or empathy erosion then into the work of Emily Vazalan who wrote a book about bullying that that bullying is about a lack of Empathy so he kind of starts talking about that actually does bring that up the things that are inhibiting empathy and bringing in the psychopathy Which is kind of your specialty of of knowledge and experience and narcissism to I think a lack of empathy is An indispensable ingredient in Ineval I agree, but I don't think it's the only one. I think even I think even implies Free meditation and planning. I think evil implies pleasure in inflicting pain and hurt upon others I Think I think there is a monopoly of other elements ingredients and components in evil Which are very little to do with the lack of empathy although I agree that evil is not possible Without a lack of empathy. It's a it's a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one in my So there's other factors then that would lead into evil one would be the pleasure of inflicting pain or on others There's there's these other factors. There's more of a constellation of factors with empathy being one of them And of course primitive station of planning. I mean even even people have Are usually goal oriented the goal may be pleasure because they're sadists But whatever it is or even people are goal oriented I mean a little fitler was goal oriented. Whatever else you wish to say about me Even people are goal oriented so there's premeditation and planning and and some of them enjoy what they do So they're the same as all the dogs and they are indifferent to other people and yes A lack of empathy is essential and without it. There would be no evil. I agree with it for me But to say that evil equals the lack of empathy is a reductionist view Which denudes and deprives evil of components? Which are very important and without which we will not be able to control the evil and confine it and constrain it and misunderstanding of evil is evil Is dangerous? And I think this empathy-based approaches to evil work. They say well, there's only one problem You know you solve the issue of empathy. There will be no evil. I think it's not only naive. It's bloody dangerous It deprives us of the weapons that we need to confront and confine you So if you're just simplify it that empathy that evil is a lack of empathy that that's too Simplistic that you need to go into more deeply to understand maybe the the motivations for seeking pleasure and the use of With goals how goal And really it's important to understand the whole constellation of experiences around Evil and not just simplify it to one term like empathy Yeah, because if you look if you look at Nazi Germany It would be completely wrong to say that there was no empathy there The the Germans felt felt empathy towards each other It is just that they did not feel empathy towards the Poles and the And the Ukrainians and the Russians and of course the Jews and the gypsies and homosexuals and many other groups But so there was no problem of lack of empathy there. There was for instance a problem of exclusion There was a problem of a narrative There was a problem of Who is human being and who is vermin? That's there was a Evil in Germany was compounded phenomenon not it could not have been reduced only to the issue of empathy because empathy was there It was just misdirected It was it was exclusive not inclusive It was and and so on and actually Paul Bloom himself mentions in his essay That you could get two groups to be fully empathic only in complete disagreement as to who deserves the empathy Which is very true So, you know, it's very simplistic to say evil is lack of empathy and that's it Mm-hmm problems. Oh, yeah, so yeah, so you would like to see the full Understanding of what evil is and you think that that's too For me, you know what you were talking about with the in the in the in the Nazi Germany There was empathy within you know within the group kind of an in-group empathy and lack of empathy For other people and for me, that's like I look at a culture of empathy in which I define as empathy for Everyone and encouraging empathy, so it's like not see if Germany had had empathy for everyone You know, I mean the people had empathy for each other had empathy for you know Everyone in the world as well as we're supporting empathy between others and for me That's kind of like my definition of a culture of empathy where you kind of support that That kind of that way of being and they do and so Paul goes into Enthusiasm for creating more empathy, which is very fitting. So he's saying that there is all this You know interest and fostering empathy mentions Jeremy Rifkin about the empathic civilization You know, he talks about that we need more empathy even an empathy for the biosphere kind of a global empathy Then he mentions Paul Ehrlich humanity on a tightrope which He wants to he also advocates for you know more empathy to emotionally join a global family and so he's just saying there's there's these movements out there for creating more Empathy in the world and that these are very he calls them sophisticated books You know these are scholarly these people have a reputation and so forth So he does talk about this movement, which I guess I'm part of to foster empathy out into the world And then here I have a here here with your permission. I have a personal experience. Okay, great In my other in my mother in my main capacity actually on an economic advisor to governments That's my job. That's what I do And so I've been advising governments in Africa and Eastern Europe and Middle East and so forth. That's That's how I subsist not on my noses So I I have witnessed the effects of misguided empathy Misguided global empathy empathy for everyone everywhere not the Nazi type of empathy, which is exclusive but your kind of empathy which is inclusive and globalized and indiscriminate and Unlimited and so and I've witnessed the the outcomes and effects of this kind of empathy in places like Sierra Leone and Nigeria where I've been advising to presidents and governments. That's all I had first first and experience And so consider for instance the issue of child labor There are a zillion NGOs well funded may I had a zillion NGOs who go around And fight child labor in the name of empathy They advertise with the children and the children's flight And they have this heart-breaking and harrowing stories of how children crawl in mine shafts and iron wallets and so And these NGOs were very successful They did succeed to reduce the level of child labor in numerous countries in Africa in Latin America Then he saw the stage in To levels which they consider to be either acceptable or you know the default level Yet this had devastating economic effects on the families of these children These children go to work because there is no alternative Economic educational environmental there simply is no alternative in many cases. They are the main breadwinners In other cases their supplementary income is very important Yet in other cases if you don't work they end up being male and female prostitutes and so on So in some of these countries the outcome the outcomes of this misguided indiscriminate Everyone is my brother empathy Ended up being pushing thousands of youngsters to prostitution and drug abuse Ended up bankrupting hundreds of thousands of families especially in rural areas Ended up ruining of the culture and mining in many of these places and so on so forth This is one example of many that I've witnessed Which led me led me to believe that Misguided empathy is as dangerous as a lack of empathy So yeah, you're you're what I'm hearing there is that you're doing consulting to different Governments and in the field of economics and you and this actually ties in that you're saying that it has some the empathy This there's kind of this misguided empathy and that's actually right where we are on Paul Bloom's point He says empathy has unfortunate features. It's parochial Meaning it's narrow narrowly restricted in scope outlook provincial It's narrow-minded lacking tolerance breath view sympathy That it's petty and enumerate without a basic knowledge of mathematics and arithmetic And that's a little bit what you're actually describing here is the scenario of that in terms of child labor That there's these groups they feel that they're having empathy for the children And they want to kind of contribute to the well-being of the children. It's and they it's not a system that there's Oh, and it's actually narcissistic you're saying that that these ropes These groups are narcissistic because their behavior implies omniscience. They know better They know best their values should prevail their culture their culture should prevail their preferences should prevail They empathize with the children even if the children would completely disagree with them, you know, yeah, they saw their empathy is Dictated it's a top-down empathy. It's not a grasslands empathy there So it's empathy as a narcissistic tool of cultural and social imperialism Colonialism if you wish. Yeah, empathy is a very dangerous tool Then this case is yeah, it's sorry that you're seeing that empathy that what they're doing is actually like narcissistic Because they have this notion of how things should be and they're imposing it on others They're saying they're not saying the children or to other people in the community, you know What are your feelings about this? How does this relate to you there? They have oh children shouldn't work and then we're gonna make this the law and use, you know force cultural force You know the police laws to impose this view and then that that has all these ripple effects You're saying that you know children out of work, you know, they can't make money They go into prostitution the families who deprived of money the mining industry maybe gets affected So it's having all these ripple effect negative ripple effects because it's really kind of a form of narcissism that these organizations have I think empathy taken too far empathy taken too far Becomes narcissistic That's a joke. That's the irony. If you take empathy too far You become a narcissist because it implies a godlike power, omniscience, omnipotence And knowing the right way and this is this is the main complaint of third world countries against the United States American exceptionalism, you know imposing cultural values such as democracy or child labor prohibitions or what have you I mean any of a number of western values On countries where you know are not ready yet or are not interested at all in in these value systems and so on So we have I I am a conspiracy theorist in this sense I think empathy Is being abused for foreign policy purposes And for money-making purposes by NGOs corporations and governments Especially in the western world I think they have discovered the secret of leveraging empathy or what they call empathy To make money to impose values and even to impose themselves on on resources resource rich countries and regions and so So when when there is a human intervention human rights intervention like in Kosovo or in iraq You have to ask yourself Was it done because of empathy with the iraqi people who by the way lost a million A million people were killed in iraq. Yeah out of empathy. Was it a question of empathy? Was it a question of oil? Was it a question of Kosovo's very price strategic position in in south europe? Why was it done? Why did they intervene because of an impending genocide looming genocide? Or was it was it's a set of interests? cloaked and disguised As empathy and i'm very worried about it very worried that good people like you and I have no doubt that your motives are pure Good people like you Might be compromised By the powers that be they always do that they always do that the internet started as a beautiful pure creation Look at it now commercialized and worse The the latest scandal with the nsa. It's all internet based. It's all the snooping is internet based I mean, so they're taking the purest most beautiful things These powers that be and they take them they contaminate them They could and so I'm very afraid that empathy would become this kind of thing this kind of work So you have like an actual fear that They're a fear that empathy which is kind of like a beautiful thing kind of at its core That it will actually be used for manipulation And uh, it will be used in an unempathic way It's like it has the title of empathy on it, but it's really about it's only it's only a front for manipulation and control and and self-interest Which always happens that's what I'm trying to tell you it always happens I mean I just gave you the example of the internet the internet started as a really beautiful libertarian Wonderful idea of sharing of communitarianism or the internet was the purest idea ever And look at it now Look at the internet now commercialized Compromised by by the likes of the lsa Huge mega corporations intruding on your privacy spying on you Collecting data on you forcing you into an ad infested world, you know Internet has become a very unpleasant neighbor a very unpleasant place in my view with So and it's all the work of all of what I call the powers and be corporations governments and NGOs These are the three main players in a so-called civil society NGOs themselves are a perfect example of the abuse of empathy The abuse of Because NGOs are self-enriching and you well know the statistics that anywhere between 50 and 80 percent of donations End up being spent on the stuff Of the of the NGO itself. I mean anywhere depending on the NGO, but a sizable part of the donations Is being spent on laptops and four or five star hotels and and first-class travel and what have you so We should be very very careful when we when we try to globalize empathy or to Render it a policy tool and I think that's what So you feel real this is why you feel a real resonance with paul bloom about that that this empathy can get kind of like Corrupted and used and manipulated it maybe it starts In one way then it becomes like a tool for manipulation Self-aggrandizement, you know getting your own computers your own job And it becomes about self-interest keeping your organization going and all that kind of stuff And you have a real concern about that because it's actually kind of corrupting the uh, the the beauty of empathy I mean the true beauty of it From ideal from ideal to ideal That's a transition So you have to be really careful to Not turn empathy into a kind of a narcissism a form of narcissism In itself. Yeah Well in terms of the model you're talking about because I think paul bloom actually mentioned that too about AIDS, you know to foreign countries is I mean it's exact parallel to what you're talking about and For me like a culture of empathy would be you know, not the ngo going in and saying That uh, this is how it has to be but it would be about creating an empathic dialogue between all parties involved It's about having the children, you know talking with the parents the parents talking with the Community and creating an empathic dialogue for them to kind of work out the the problems that they have And so for me, that's what the culture of empathy is is about is really that That nurturing Of hearing what it is that people want, you know, where are they? It's really about hearing them As well as fostering the dialogue between all parties involved So that's uh, I do I see I know what you're talking about with that And there's another part to that too is the sympathy part that sometimes there's this People think that they're doing empathy and all it is that they are either feeling sorry for the people in in other countries or they're You know saying oh, I'm distressed because you're besides I'm perceiving you as being distressed So it's more about their own distress, which is you know another form of sympathy So that empathy and sympathy seems to get kind of mixed in there as well Yeah The problem raises an important an important issue I think we should make a distinction between Individual empathy and institutional empathy Most of his arguments have most of them not all of them, but most of them have to do with Individual empathy and how it is channeled And how it is translated into policy policy initiatives decision-making and policies in general He says that individual empathy is a bad foundation um a wrong foundation For deriving policy initiatives policies and so on he says that individuals when they exercise empathy do it In an irrational way in effect They don't have a synoptic view. So they don't weigh all the facts They tend to identify only with specific victims Not with everyone not with every victim. So there is the victim identification bias There are many cognitive deficits. There are many there's a lot of bias and many prejudices including stereotypical prejudice prejudices In in the application of empathy by individuals and he says you can't take empathy on the individual level Which is that Bias that that prejudice that discriminatory you can't just take it and extrapolate it And so, okay, we take this a pool of empathy. We'll pull it together And we we leverage it we lift it up and we make it into a national policy or something So that would be would be wrong Because when you go up one level or two levels or three levels and you have this synoptic view you have all the facts You you see the future generations in future outcomes You can weigh pros and cons of various policy measures when you do all that you may get outcomes They do not appear to be empathic But actually are constructive productive and in the long term much more empathic than if you apply an individual view So I think he's making an issue or at least he should make a distinction between individual empathy which is really influenced by one's predilections and biases and prejudices and education and culture and society and experiencing life and fears and hopes and needs and wishes So many factors influence influenced once personal Empathy and tendency to empathize that we cannot generalize and say there is empathy There is admins empathy and there is Joseph's empathy and there is Madden's empathy, but there's no kind of empathy like an entity On the individual level, but on the institutional level we can create empathic policies But these policies must take into account low-term consequences All the facts they must be rational And they must be rationed They must take into account scarcity of resources and they must allocate resources rationally and So I I agree with him that empathy is a bad policy guide On the individual level, but not on the institutional level. I think on the institutional level empathy is a good policy Only only empathy institutional empathy is not like individual empathy They don't look the same at all so people say Well, institutional empathy is not empathy at all. That's wrong. It's simply a different type of empathy more long-term more synoptic more all-encompassing More detailed more sophisticated more reason more rational You understand what I'm saying I'll let me say if I hear yeah So you're making a distinction between an empathy that one person feels Towards others and there's like that's like one quality of of empathy But then when people start bringing their empathy together and try to make policy out of that empathy that Actually, well, you're saying that the the self empathy that one person feels Is it has all these kind of biases kind of built into it kind of the cultural bias Paul bloom is saying that oh, it's not what you're saying But you're just saying what Paul bloom is that there it has all these kind of built-in biases But you're saying that when you kind of aggregate You know the people make policies that that that group Policy empathy is actually more It's actually more accurately empathic Yes, I think that institutional empathy or what you call group empathy might be a much better way Institutional group empathy is the real empathy Because it's reason rational Russian in the sense that it takes sense of scarcity of resources The allocation is more fair more just takes into account future generations not only current generations Takes into account the masses best numbers And not individual victims who happen to be your race and your Your Culture and your so on the on the on the level of institutions We can apply empathy Far more even-handedly We can be much more prescient We can we can take into account future consequences We can do much more much better on this level And and paul bloom's argument That empathy in general is a bad guy Is where I disagree with him Empathy on the individual level is a bad guy, but it's an excellent guy on the institutional group now Okay Let's see the Let's see difference between what I'm what I think of paul bloom thinking Uh-huh. So paul bloom paul bloom says the individual a little bit of empathy is good at the individual level But it has a lot of problems But it especially has even more problems when you put it into a a group policy level So we need to kind of leave out of the policy level. You're saying that uh, the uh That at an individual level, there's all these problems with empathy, but if you bring people together in a group That there's actually more potential for empathy in a group setting For the correct kind of empathy I disagree I disagree completely with paul bloom That empathy cannot be a guideline for policy formation I completely disagree So you're you're disagreeing with paul. You're saying that uh empathy can be actually really good for uh, because and then you bring in rationality you bring in Uh, there was some other long-term planning. So you're you're synoptic synoptic Everything that that a group can do that individuals usually don't do And and you know the it's it's what we call in in physics and in epi phenomenon It's an emergent quality Groups don't act as individuals do When you put a few people together There is there are emergent qualities. There are things that emerge that are not manifest on the individual level And I think empathy Let's call it rational empathy non-biased empathy non-prejudiced empathy is one of these emergent Qualities one of these emergent phenomena. I think when you put a group of good people together Of course, I'm not talking about ss guards We put a group a group of reasonably good people together. They are bound to come up with rational well-reasoned effective productive and constructive empathy I disagree with both that empathy on all levels Wherever it emerges is a bad policy guide. There. I mean, it's a great competition So you're saying if you bring a group together who are very are good or even are empathic and Have empathic awareness, maybe if you bring them together that what will emerge will be a very positive uh supportive empathic But if you bring together some people who are very un empathic like, you know ss guards or whatever that they're going to they're going to be manifesting these un empathic policies So you kind of want to bring together people who have like who are good or have empathic qualities But their empathy but their empathy May not be I immediately identifiable as empathy Their form of empathy. This is what we call institutional group their empathy May not be immediately identifiable as empathy as individuals experience empathy Because poor bloom is right Individual empathy is flawed It is biased. It is prejudice. It is short-sighted. It's provincial. It's parochial. You know, it's bad I mean not that it's limited and it's skewed individual group their group empathy It ought to be more rational more reason, etc. So if you look at the two Empathies, you may not recognize group empathy as empathy But it's still empathy. It's just a different kind of empathy It's a it's a kind of empathy that for instance takes future generations into account It's a kind of empathy that has all the facts not only a subset of the facts It's a kind of empathy that gives aid To chinese and black kids as well as to the white Baby in the well, you know It's it's a kind of empathy that does not discriminate according to race level of education social economic factors and so on while individual giving Individual empathy individual donations and charity does discriminate. There are numerous etc. So You need it on first blush first look Institutional empathy does not look like empathy at all, but it is it is Providing these are good people But you're right if you put together a group of unempathic or disempathic people The emergent phenomenon what will emerge the emergent quality would be Auschwitz It goes both ways If you put a group of bad people together You will have this empathy For the good group of good people together. You will have empathy empathy will emerge. They don't even have to work at it It will simply emerge because it's part of who they are. This is part of the definition of being a good person So being part of a good person is to have like empathy And that when you get together with other people like that that this empathic quality will kind of emerge So it's a little bit if we use your story about the The ngo is going into some countries and with child labor So what they're doing is it's in a sense. They're almost like an individual just going and imposing Their their ideas out So if you go into what would be building a culture of empathy is to go to the those communities and say Let's get together and actually dialogue about this process and see what emerges out of this Out of the relationship of all the stakeholders. So you're wanting to Foster empathic dialogue. So everyone in the community is heard And that all their feelings and needs and desires and aspirations and values are kind of shared And then when that through that communication that happens with all the stakeholders that policies will kind of emerge out of that Out of that out of those relationships and everyone is kind of part of the decision making And that that would be like a real positive aspect of of a social cultural empathy kind of No dialogue is possible Without an underlying assumption of equality No empathy is possible Without an underlying assumption of similarity If you are dissimilar to me found an alien an alien from mars would be hard-pressed to have empathy with you Never mind how empathic this alien is in mars, you know So the empathy assumes Some basic similarity Assumes some equality Maybe not in quality equality in the level of education, but equality is human beings And in these are the pillars and foundations of a true dialogue And the error of NGOs and governments and so on is that they do not assume equality And they do not assume similarity They want to make people similar to them because they assume that they are not similar to them They want to make people to raise people to their level Because they assume automatically that they are superior It's like radiot Kipling's white man's burden, you know They they want they so By definition, they are not empathic You cannot have empathy when you assume that your fellow being is not similar to you and not equal to you That's why I call these NGOs. That's why I call them narcissistic Because this is the essence of narcissism Narcissist believes that he's superior to you and that you are not similar to you You are a subspecies an inferior subspecies And he is the Superman the Nietzschean Superman. So this is narcissism And unfortunately empathy empathy is often confused with narcissism. Yeah So there's the NGOs in this situation are kind of like maybe self-righteous It's like we are right in the way And what we are thinking is the right way of doing it. So we will impose our righteousness on you So maybe see if it's really about righteousness and self-righteousness that it's like I don't need to hear where you are Because I already know better than you do what's important for you So I am and I am so right in my righteousness But I'm going to kind of impose it on you instead of even bothering to see the similarities and hear your voice and And really empathize with who you are So the self-righteousness is a huge block as far as I can see for empathy But that's precisely but that's precisely what underlies religion and ideologies Religion and other types of ideologies have this inbuilt assumption of Exclusive and exclusivity of the truth And therefore I agree with Dawkins That religion by definition cannot be empathic There can be no empathic religion unless that religion claims that it is not in possession I've been thinking of the idea of starting a church of a church of empathy That there's no theology. It's only about fostering empathic connection And using, uh, you know human centered design to hear what people's needs and aspirations are To create in an ongoing way the the the a church to address people's needs. So it's something I've been I've been playing great. It's great. It's a great tax scam. You know a good tax scam You think this is a good way to tax scam. It's get all tax free money here through the road So, okay a few true believers Uh-huh, sorry Well, I'm good with keeping the dialogue going. I have time. I don't know how you are. I saw you kind of checking over your time I have no obligation. Okay. So it's it's what you were talking about that scenario of the Empathy. Oh, there's also there's the empathy Paul bloom tells a lot of stories about empathy similar to what you were telling about with the ngo So the idea is is that You know, some of this girl falls into the well in 1949 like Kathy fiskas And then the whole country is kind of like riveted and he says that they're empathizing with her and they're not empathizing with with other people. So it's a little bit like the um, that empathy is kind of like Directed in one direction and not the other and therefore empathy is bad That's kind of like the basic notion there as I'm seeing it And he kind of says that in a lot of different ways that here. I am as an individual. I'm having empathy here But not empathy over there Um, there's a Implies what I would call an empathy fatigue That means you have sort of a limited amount of empathy and if you if you're using it in one place then you're running short You don't have enough for others It's a bit of a bizarre notion if you ask me because I think empathy is a replenishable Commodity either you have it or you don't even if you have it you have it in unlimited quantities by definition It's not like if you've expanded on your empathy on on this girl You would become a monster with all everyone else. It's yeah, it's either in you or it's a it's a defining parameter of who you are It's not a it's not a commodity But it seems to imply that it is a commodity and indeed we have this, you know This fatigue element of fatigue after too much giving and so on people tend to Sort of drop off and they don't give so much anymore But I think I think there's also this mistake of identifying giving with empathy. Yeah Yeah, like if you don't give then you're not empathic or if you don't give enough And there's sort of money like the measurement of empathy like the meter of empathy the lover in paris You know we have a meter of empathy and it's how much you've given Of your charity donations charitable donations, and I think it's highly mistaken I think empathy is actually recent studies in in various University pbs had a wonderful program about it with Paul Solomon The recent studies have shown That very poor people have the highest coefficient of empathy Empathy declines with power and money the more money you have the more powerful you are the less empathic you are So those giants of commerce and industry will give billions of dollars By these studies at least on the least empathic It is the very poor Who are the most empathic and they don't have to they don't have anything to give I mean they're in need of receiving Come giving it. So I think this misidentification of empathy with giving Has corrupted the debate corrupted The discussion of empathy because now we measure everything with dollars and cents. It's a serious mistake Yeah, so that there is there's a quality of empathy Uh, and there's this notion that if I give you something that that somehow this is empathy And that could be the motivations could be guilt. It could be You know manipulation it could be trying to get a good image Or it there could be all kinds of underlying motivations for the giving And you don't know what those motivations necessarily are. So the giving is not necessarily a correlation with empathy No, that there's a yeah, not necessarily it could be but maybe not also A good a good word a good word the shoulder to cry on a smile These are acts of empathy and sometimes they far outweigh any amount of money you you can give to them to some And most charitable charitable charitable donation, sorry, at least in the united states a tax motivated I doubt very much that there's a lot of empathy going on there, you know And uh, so I don't know giving has been institutionalized. It's in the tax code It's there's a lot of ulterior there are many ulterior motives behind giving To use it as a yardstick and benchmark for empathy. It's a serious mistake in my view contaminates the debate Yeah So it's really you want to get into what is the real nature of empathy You know and there's all these things that get confused with empathy, you know, maybe the sympathy or or it's it's hidden self-interest or whatever So it's really kind of having to tease all that apart and And uh, kind of confuses the the situation So the other part that you were talking about, uh, which is uh, paul's notion that, you know You have empathy in one direction and then you don't have empathy for others Therefore empathy is bad in a sense because And I have that same sense too that then the idea is is is we need to expand that empathic way of being so that uh And he mentions for example the court case, which I think is a good example So the idea is that uh That there's a court case someone has done something bad to someone else And then people identify with the uh, the victim And they have empathy for the victim And then they create all these really bad policies, you know out of that empathy that they have for the victim but the the um, the thing that's not Considered there for me is that it's really about empathy is not just that one Direction a culture of empathy for me is that You as a juror or the judge have empathy for everyone involved and everyone involved has empathy with each other So it's so you really want to expand that empathy just because people have a narrow empathy Doesn't mean that empathy itself is bad Or negative. It's that It's the lack of empathy in other directions That is the problem It's the it's the limitation of the empathy So it's the deficit of empathy that is the problem So empathy needs to fill that that deficit between all parties and who are there You're raising two in my view, uh crucial critical points Can we say that exclusionary or what you call narrow empathy? Israeli empathy If we exclude certain people Even if they are perpetrators Or Jews in Nazi Germany or Palestinians in Israel Or blacks in America or whatever If our empathy is directed only at those who resemble us or whatever if it's narrow Can we then say that it exists? And I tend to agree with you If I understood you correctly that an empathy that is not indiscriminate Tends to yield disempathic outcomes And I think the only true empathy is indiscriminate The only form of true empathy because as we as we said in Nazi Germany there was empathy Only it was limited to a certain group of people the Aryans And in in Israel there is a lot of empathy between the israelis but very very little empathy towards the Palestinians Or first hand it's a testimony, you know So Empathy if it is exclusionary if it is narrow if it is limited to one group of people Who happen to resemble you or you are affiliated with In my view leads Almost invariably to disempathic outcomes It undermines the very notion and concept of empathy The second thing you you said is you gave the example of the court the court case The court case is another example Where there are additional motives You remember that we discussed earlier the issue of money giving giving as a proxy for empathy And we said that giving cannot be a good proxy to empathy because there are other motives Guilt tax evasion you name Same same for the court case same with the court case in the court case Punishing the perpetrator severely Vindictively May have to do with retribution Not with empathy May have to do with sadism prurian sadism May have to do with voyeurism, you know Seeing someone May have to do with with vengeance May have to do with religious convictions Not necessarily with empathy Now how do we take such a case And isolate empathy In a lab and measure it we can't do that. There's no way to do that So all these proxies for empathy money Judicial policy All these proxies are wrong proxies because they Leads they are motivated by other anterior motives, which have nothing to do with empathy They may be motivated by it And so when we can't isolate the element of empathy and say, you know 34 percent of it is empathy and 12 percent is retribution and 17 percent is religious and so on We can't do that Same as we can do with giving. We can't say Giving is 27 percent empathy and 15 percent tax consideration. We can't do that So I suggest I think That we should let go of our tendency to measure We have this tendency. We're a very quantifiable society. We're very we we want to quantize and quantify everything You know, we want to measure. It's a scientific state of mind, you know Every if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist. You know, so we need to measure So court cases statistics Charity statistics everything is statistics suddenly and but empathy is not about that at all empathy is the fabric Of interactions between people most of which are not measurable and not quantifiable It is the sum total of emergent happiness Happiness that is the outcome of these interactions How can you measure happiness? It's these are You just feel it Entity is a feeling base. It's really the german that means i'm through them It's not a it's not a quantity, you know, and it's a it's a great mistake to To try to scientific scientific empathy Yeah, so that too there's this in the culture of this measurement I hear it all the time as well We have to measure empathy if we want to bring it into the schools We have to have measurements of empathy and everybody's trying to figure out how to kind of measure it And you're kind of feeling that this whole notion of just measuring it. It's not about measuring It's about feeling it's a felt experience And so you you can't kind of just be focused on the measuring you got to be focused on the feeling and the experience of it When it's there, you will know It's exactly like love When it's there, you know, it's there You don't measure the level of are you with me? Yeah, that it's like love the uh that you don't like sit there and measure love You kind of experience and you know it by the experience of love Exactly Either it's there or it's not there. I mean, you know when you're in love You don't need to measure the the level of of biochemicals in your brain or or in your blood or you don't go wrong with the drips You just know that you're in love and similarly When when when you encounter an empathic person When you feel empathic when you are in an empathic interactions, you know, it's there There are Many things which are not quantifiable or measurable by any by any In the attempt to to equate these things with biochemicals or or brain activity or Is ridiculous. It's philosophically not sustainable because we can at most talk about correlation We can't talk about causation And we don't know what causes what Does love cause the activity in the brain or does the activity in the brain cause love The chicken and egg it's it's a doomed enterprise to take empathy to take empathy to disassemble it To find its to to define its components and to measure it is a doomed enterprise and and And degrades empathy So it's like the there's actually To kind of scientifically take empathy and try to make it an object of Observation and study and taking it apart is a kind of a degrading of the empathic experience because it's maybe it's translating it into Into an analytical or it's translating it into a more of a can I don't know maybe controlled or something Feeling instead of having just the experience of that empathic experience And and that when you experience it you will know it because you can just feel it As an felt experience as I'm understanding it The other thing was within the court case that you know, you're talking about Yeah, what is going on in the court case like how much empathy is in that court case You know, maybe even how much can you feel and you know, paul is saying well, it's this empathy towards one person It's leading to these bad Um Outcomes and you're saying that well, maybe there's retribution involved and there's all kinds of other you know Values that are you know mixed in there that might not have anything to do with empathy and that's kind of my sense too in terms of Justice system in it of itself is a very low empathic environment It's not about let's have connection between all the parties That it's really about it's set up as people are individualistic self-interested beings We have to use competition to battle it out kind of like gladiators To kind of come to the truth and then we use retribution and all these other approaches to you know Punish and beat people in the into submission So the very structure of the justice system is very Has a low empathy Component in my view that would what what we really need is to replace it with You know there's some attempts to replace it with restorative justice And I would say that at the end of restorative justice is restorative empathy Would be actually a more accurate term that we're needing to Foster empathic connection between all the parties involved Between someone who feels that they've been harmed between people who have perhaps Been seen as having harmed and the community and others affected by it for them to really get together and to have that dialogue and those Practices that nurture that connection between each other Three three perfect examples illustrating what you're saying Is the truth and reconciliation commission in south africa where they they They could have chosen the adversarial adversarial system Or you know to adversaries the the defense and the prosecution And then the the perpetrator Is punished Never rehabilitated only punished and so this is the western way of justice. It's an adversarial it's vindictive it's Centered on retribution not on restoration water and rehabilitation But it's not universal. It's not a universal justice system. There are many places on earth Where the justice system is not like that So one example is is the truth and reconciliation commission in in south africa But we have an example closer to home in ireland in northern ireland After the after the Accords in 1998 and so on so forth They brought together higher aid members, you know terrorists and their victims And they had this heart heart wrenching heart-rending meetings between the terrorists and his victims And it was a reconciliation process And they did it in with a few thousand terrorists and their victims in ireland, which is not you know, not africa And and mentioning africa finally in africa to this very day in many many countries They still have the village justice system. It's a communal system. It's a consensual system Where everyone participated in the process of justice Where victims and perpetrators try to understand each other's motives and motivations and even the most heinous crimes, you know And where they are trying to restore this the situation to what it had been There is punishment involved of course But the punishment is integral integrity and integrated into a process of healing healing of the community Of the victim and of the perpetrator and that exists in primitive so-called primitive Village societies village-based societies in sub-saharan africa, cameroon, charred, you know all these places We can learn from the next one So there are attempts at non adversarial non western Justice systems because the western justice system has deteriorated to the point that we imprison millions And it's not working. It's not forget now the moral consideration simply not working It's not there's no deterring value and there's no restorative value. There's no rehabilitative value It's the recidivism is is like 70 percent. It's not working That's a Yeah, um, he broke up there that last couple words, but um, yeah, so that that's uh, that the there's these societies And and yeah, those are societies I mean for You know tens or you know hundreds a thousand years, you know societies have been working empathically to do problem solving and to And have maybe developed these empathic community Processes where everyone has heard they try to restore connection if a respect connection has been broken And so that's a real model. I I see that too is that we really need to transform the whole justice system Because it's it's just not built on a empathic, you know, it's not structurally trying to foster empathic connection between People and so that kind of brings it to I think we've kind of The the the notion that I get from paul bloom It's over and over and again the same kind of notion that you have empathy directed, you know for one person it lead or one group or whatever it leads to bad consequences and then It's that same notion of the justice system. We're just talking about it's It's all kinds of variations of that same basic dynamic And for me, it's a little bit almost like I've been thinking of trying to have a analogy or a metaphor And for me, it was kind of like, you know, there's someone walking in the desert You know, they're they're they're thirsty their lips are chapped their tongue is swollen You know, it's the sahara, you know, sun is beating down. You're like craving water craving water. I need water You know and you're like near death And then you find a canteen and in the canteen is just a little bit of water And you drink that a little bit of water And it's like i'm still thirsty I drank water what I've been craving, but i'm still thirsty And so water must be bad You know the water must be bad. So for me, it's kind of like empathy Paul bloom is out there. He's out in the desert You know, it's like we have a little bit of empathy We have a little bit of water You taste it that little bit of water and then you blame the water for your thirst So it's almost like I kind of seeing it as a empathy deficit delirium In the sense that you blame the blame the thing that you kind of need to expand instead of And then he's talking about we need to have measurements and all this kind of stuff It's a little bit tying into what you're talking about It's kind of like saying well, my thirst will be quenched by a cup of calculators You know slide rulers and measuring devices that will quench my thirst So that's a little bit that's just my little analogy that i've been kind of playing with and i'm just wondering how that kind of Resonates I enjoyed it I've been having fun when it's very visual. So, okay, um Let's see the Yeah, it's just i'm kind of looking through his uh his His stories, you know, he tells a lot of different stories. Um You know about gun control and and but they're all kind of that same, you know about vaccines that there's a Uh that there is limited empathy this limited empathy leads to bad consequences And I think it's kind of like we've kind of addressed it and it's kind of like the same story over and over again Um, I think we I think we can safely move to narcissists and psychopaths. Okay. He did an hour and a half to mr. Bloom uh-huh Well, I think that yeah that that kind of uh You know what i'm thinking is maybe we could wrap it up and set another time because i'm concerned about the video In terms of I don't know how these recordings. I agree because this is like really really enjoying this I love chatting with you having a lot of fun. I think it's very insightful too I think there's a lot of great insight here about the nature of empathy So I would recommend we end this is one clip and there may be a schedule just a dialogue about narcissism and and and that so Narcissism cycles to be an empathy. Uh-huh. Yeah, absolutely. No problem. What's wrong? Okay, great, then I will try to figure out how to this Stop recording