Empathy is a Double Edged Sword

The other day I saw a guy who must have seen about 14 or 15, out riding on his bicycle in a small public car park that had a few ramps and things that he was trying to use to perform tricks on his bike with - quite successfully I might add.  The thing that struck me however was that he was alone.  It was about 4 in the afternoon and it was raining.  I was sitting in the car waiting for my Dad.  I felt sorry for the guy.  Now that sorrow may not have been wanted, and I shall never know.  Some people are content in themselves and don't need others around them.  Some people can be completely alone and not be bothered by it.  Last week on Britain Unzipped on BBC Three, a statistic was shared that said 10% of Britons when asked how many real friends they had said they didn't have any.  That extrapolates to 6.2 million people in the UK who don't see themselves as having any real friends. 

If you want to know more about Britain Unzipped visit BBC Three's website

Empathy is the emotional sympathy we feel when a personal connection is made between us and something we see that warrants sympathy - it may be something sad but it may not be necessarily.  To take empathy to the extreme if we empathised with everyone we ever met that we thought was worse off than us we would ultimately break down.  Ignorance is an important part of our lives.  Don't get me wrong I am not advocating ignoring the rest of the world and being completely selfish, I would actually regard myself as being quite empathetic maybe more than I should.  I care about people and it is that nature that caused the reaction I detailed above.  Now the question is whether or not empathy is a weakness or a strength.  I have said to an extent ignorance is an important part of our lives and that it is.  There are numerous examples that demonstrate how we ignore many things in our day to day lives, partly because processing the sheer amount of data we experience would not be practical, we would grind to a halt quite quickly.

Empathy is a double-edged sword for two main reasons.  On the one hand it strengthens our social responsibility as a society.  It protects the weak and defenceless by ensuring that someone will take pity on them.  One of my personal sayings is reflected here: "To only help those who help themselves is to sentence those who are not capable to certain death" - there are certain people we have to help, or we fail as a race - not as a race defined by culture but as the human race.  Then there is the other side of the sword, the exploitation of empathy.  While empathy can be seen as a strength by those that display it. equally it can be seen as a weakness by those who hold no empathy at all.  These people use those who are empathetic.  They know that they can exploit their sentimentality in order to get ahead.  While this can be seen as a stereotype there have been studies carried out with real evidence to back up these claims, if you want to learn more you can start by reading this TIME article here.

The cut-down simplification of this conclusion is simply that those who are higher in business and in commerce and government are less empathetic towards others.  It seems the more you have the less you care.  All this brings its own conclusion and a question. Although it may be true that those who are at the top are less empathetic than those at the bottom, does that mean if you are at the bottom and want to move up, that by giving up on caring about others you will rise up?  Do we have to discard empathy if we want to get ahead in life?