In my childhood, I had a deeply conflicted relationship with bullying, as children do. Whenever confronted by bullies, the adults around me—parents, teachers, concerned outsiders—encouraged me to cultivate internal strength and resilience to remain unperturbed. But if my internal strength manifested as pushing back against bullies and asserting my own dominance, those same adults punished me. I was supposed to be strong, but not strong like that.
As an adult, I understand the difference. Child bullies appear strong in the moment, and children, lacking perspective, think the current moment will exist forever. Children haven’t seen swaggering, overstuffed bullies cross that invisible line and get smacked down. Adults realize bullying bluster always contains the seeds of its own destruction (though we frequently forget in contentious moments). Children only know that big Jimmy punched me and adults did nothing.
Children are fairly singular, notwithstanding their unique and diverse personalities. They perceive reality as eternally present, assuming that past and future essentially resemble now, with different set dressing. Not until early adolescence do children develop the ability to perceive change in the historical context, to understand that the domineering forces in their lives right now, including both adults and bullies, cannot possibly hold sway forever.
Such development isn’t inevitable, however. We all know adults who continue behaving like childhood bullies, and seemingly get rewarded for it. Workplace jerks whose infantile bluster ensures nobody likes them, but they get promoted anyway, because management knows who they are. Financiers who gambled with the stored value of customers’ homes, and imploded the economy in 2008. The IDF, currently bombing hospitals and neighborhoods in Gaza.
We now know, as children cannot possibly know, that empathy for other people’s suffering has a neural basis. As a bullied kid, I thought some people just learned empathy later in life, but no: empathy is a stage of brain development. People who see others emotions, good or bad, and remain unmoved, aren’t just unskilled or unlearned; they’re suffering a form of brain damage in their mirror neuron system.
Perhaps we see this most evidently in wealthy people. Readers of a certain age will recall the stories surrounding the Enron collapse, when we discovered that corporate executives literally celebrated their customers’ suffering. More recently, Elon Musk has aggressively acquired corporations, then demolished them, to settle personal grudges. Then there’s the watchword of modern far-right politics: “the cruelty is the point.”
These people, either wealthy themselves or desperate to ally themselves with wealthy idols, demonstrate incapacity to feel others’ pain. Like schoolyard bullies, they take pleasure at seeing poor people or smaller kids crying. This forces a necessary question: did they never learn to see other people, and their feelings, as equally real to their own? Or did they maim and scar their own brains to make such knowledge go away?
I’m guessing a little of both.
Few people achieve positions of power without some demonstrated will to ignore others’ feelings. No matter which party holds the White House, Number Ten, or other halls of power, the winners probably stepped on others’ necks to get there. George Dubya’s Global War on Terror, or Barack Obama’s targeted drone killing campaigns, are only the most globally visible manifestations. Winning power always necessarily entails lack of empathy.
However, the present offers a rare opportunity to change this dynamic. Only the most ridiculous political sophists can deny that the Netanyahu government’s campaign of terror in Gaza, or Vladimir Putin’s interminable war in Ukraine, demonstrate a failure of baseline empathy for others’ suffering. But the ripple effects of both conflicts have demonstrated the weakness of countervailing forces, like NATO, which pick and choose whom to defend from atrocities.
As governments immolate, as police forces prove themselves deaf to justice, and as capitalism flips like a pancake, I believe we’re witnessing an important moment. Not the collapse of the economy or the social structure, but the collapse of the man-children who have profited from the structure’s weaknesses. Centuries of domination by people demonstrating what we now know is brain damage, may perhaps end within our own lifetimes.
What if, rather than choosing our leaders by their ability to dominate debates, we chose them by their demonstrated ability to care? Seems far-fetched, admittedly, in a society that favors glib charisma and photogenic glamor. Yet if we organize ourselves, if we take time to determine what standards of empathy and accomplishment we consider worthy of reward, then why not? Our current self-seeking leaders have international egg on their faces.
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