Why Does Empathy Have to be Earned?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I believe that healthcare, food, shelter, and education are basic human rights. For reasons I will never understand, many people do not agree.

There are a lot of reasons cited for disagreeing with the idea that any and every individual person deserves to checks notes eat food. There is the whole bootstraps thing — you know, if you’re not working hard to pull yourself up, you clearly deserve to fail.

This is, at best, tone deaf in a country where the middle class is rapidly falling into poverty while about 900 billionaires live high on the hog. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of people simply cannot budget their way out of poverty. Working harder and longer no longer gets you very far when the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in 16 years.

There are other arguments against things like food and healthcare as basic human rights — not wanting to pay for something that a person didn’t “earn” comes up a lot. All of them, however, go back to a basic lack of empathy for the people who would most benefit from inexpensive food, healthcare, and housing.

It doesn’t even matter who those people are, because they are a significant portion of Americans right now, and they cut across all demographics. The point is that people who argue against providing things that should be considered basic human rights to those who need them have a critical lack of empathy.

I’m not even talking about the whole “empathy will be the downfall of western civilization” thing that popped up in the past year or two (although that is also a problem). I’m talking about the notion that you have to somehow earn a person’s empathy and sympathy before they will even begin to consider helping you.

We have to tell sob stories on GoFundMe and beg our local communities for dimes so we can afford to pay for rent, food, or other necessities that should be considered basic human rights. Why should this be necessary? Why do we have to earn empathy from people before they will offer to help?

I have always been frustrated with the notion of logic versus emotion as a sort of battle for superiority. Some people will say that being in touch with your emotions is a positive thing and can help you see the good in the world and other people. Others say that emotional reactions are sub-optimal and only by applying cold logic can one come to the best conclusion.

This should very clearly never be a case of one being better than the other. Emotional and logical inputs to any problem should be considered, since there is never a purely logical or purely emotional solution to anything.

However, I tend to lend fault to those on the side of logic who push it to an absurd degree. These are people who play devil’s advocate and pose intellectual questions and exercises in comment sections, then when challenged suddenly sound like they’re writing a high-minded missive during the American Revolution.

(Seriously, watch one of these dumbasses get challenged on an idea and then suddenly pull out a bunch of five-dollar words and write nine paragraphs of dense prose to explain why poor people should die in a gutter, actually.)

However, because we as society value logical arguments and undervalue emotional ones, logic tends to win out in arguments even when it’s faulty. By extension, Intellectual exercises are poised as logical and therefore infallible.

And, because empathy is often seen as illogical and therefore flawed, arguments that get “too emotional” tend to get discredited, even when they are stronger than an argument based in pure logic. A pile of people making good points about the basic human dignity of anyone with a negative net worth are often roundly ignored and talked down to by one or two shitheads who are playing devil’s advocate in the comments.

However, when you play devil’s advocate, you’re (knowingly or not) advocating for the devil. The upshot is that people acting in bad faith will use an “intellectual exercise” as weapons against an out-group.

You get someone who will look at something like welfare — an outdated but oft-used term, so let’s go with it — and make it into an intellectual exercise, then use the result of their logical gusto to justify cutting it. They may cite fraud, waste, and abuse as hallmarks of so-called poor people abusing the system to actually live pretty well, and advocate for its reduction or destruction.

All of their “logical” arguments completely ignore the many millions of real people that those cuts would impact, instead calling it a necessity to cut waste, abuse, and fraud in the system. It never crosses their minds that literal actual people will probably die as a result of those cuts. They simply justify it away with a high-minded “logical” argument that some suffering will occur as a result of the cuts, but suffering is inevitable and people who suffer should just work harder.

The thought that people deserve to eat doesn’t register to them because, in so many minds, you have to earn your place at the table. They don’t want to support someone who might be cheating the system. Why guarantee food to someone who didn’t earn it?

(Because people need food to live, you moldy turnip!)

Alternatively, and this seems to be the case more and more lately, the cruelty and needless suffering and death are the point, used to drive home some sort of political point or wear down resistance to creeping authoritarianism. Logic is weaponized against empathy — the whole “downfall of western civilization” thing that I mentioned earlier — so a handful of already wealthy people can get a bit more money.

What happened to loving your neighbor? Being a good Samaritan? Accepting the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Having respect and empathy for your fellow human beings seems to have gone out of vogue in the past few decades, replaced with a “I got mine, so fuck you” mindset that is driving the world to ruin. I hate it so much.

Empathy should not and should never have to be earned. Having empathy for your fellow human beings should be the natural state of things, not some sort of bargain in exchange for a sufficient amount of groveling and begging for tuppence.

There is so much more to be said on this subject. I haven’t even talked about the gendered aspects of logic versus emotion and how the white straight cis American patriarchy wields logic as a cudgel to repress women and minorities. The notion of women being overly-emotional reactionary messes certain to lead us to ruin is now invalid thanks to Trump, who is an overly emotional reactionary mess and is actively leading us to ruin as you are reading this.

The point of this whole thing, however, is that empathy for your fellow human beings should be the default. Treating other people as untrustworthy non-entities until they prove their worth or show sufficient need is a garbage take, plain and simple.

You don’t have to like everyone you encounter. I loathe a bunch of Republicans right now, and I would love to see them get their comeuppance once this whole era passes. That said, I don’t want to see them homeless, starving, and without healthcare. There’s a major difference between hatred and cruelty. And, while I may really, really hate a lot of people in the government right now, I will never wish cruelty upon them.

Even people who are indefinitely incarcerated for committing various international war crimes deserve food, healthcare, shelter, and a reasonable expectation of safety.

Basic human rights apply to all of us. Every single person. That’s why they’re rights.