Let’s say zero is straight up shutting your ears, going lalala and storming out of the room, let’s say 10 is sitting down with a Nazi, genuinely making an effort to see things from their point of view just to see if you could.
Sure this may sound ridiculous but it’s basic knowledge that studying your opponents viewpoints is the best way to counter them and get new insight yourself.
Me? Id like to think I’m a 6, I don’t cut family ties over their political opinions but I’m very likely to shut that down with a “I don’t want to speak politics with you”
Lemmy can be an echo chamber sometimes, but that doesn’t mean everyone here is a mindless zombie, how do you all deal with others who believe differently? Can you back it up?
“opposing viewpoints” is too broad a term for the question to be meaningful.
It could mean everything from “Discovery is the best Star Trek series” to “Women aren’t real people”, and the details of the viewpoint in question are EXTREMELY relevant to your ability to empathize with it.
10 - I can feel empathy for every human being. That doesn’t mean that I’ll accept their views, and if they are someone who would hurt others, I will certainly stop them - even with force. That’s empathy too…
Do you know what empathy is? How you practice it? How you train it?
If I’m physically safe, I think between 8 and 10 depending on my energy level. If I’m threatened or hurt in a fight, still up to 8 at least. We can love our enemies and still fight them with all the force necessary (but no more).
I think if you don’t feel safe at that point, it’s less of a debate and more of a situation that you should feel. No shame in leaving
If I don’t have a choice to leave or feel irrationally compelled to actually try to debate them 10.
It’s not a choice it’s a fucking curse. I don’t have to think, my mind will eventually start predicting what they say and eventually I want to gut myself because I can think of a hundred things to say and know that it won’t change their fucking minds.
Worse, mind reading is a fallacy. Sure predictions can be pretty accurate, but there’s no way to know for sure if those arguments will play out exactly as I think. But there’s real curse is that just because all the things I can think to say won’t change their mind, that doesn’t mean there isn’t something that will. I might just be too dumb to think of a good argument. So I rot as the conversation happens to me trying to think of anything that could make a difference.
Oh also yeah when they say horrible shit and your mind decides to go “here this is how their victims feel” that’s pretty fucking horrible too.
But if I get up or get upset or react strongly it’ll likely ruin any chance of me changing this person’s mind. Not that that chance existed in the first place.
Anyway, it isn’t difficult to see things from other people’s perspective but let me tell you I much prefer talking to psychopaths than delusional idiots.
I had a roommate who was full blown psychopath (and business major to boot lol) who, once he found out I could see things from his perspective, would debate politics with me in a completely candid manner. I once brought up “so you’d support slavery then?” And he deadass said “if it benefitted me then yes”
Fucked up, but the thing is, he’d listen to my arguments when they were logical. And he wasn’t sadistic, slightly narcissistic, but like he didn’t derive pleasure from other’s pain. Anyway the point is that when you talk to someone who is sane it doesn’t hurt even if they feel no empathy because you can start to understand why they think the way they do and it always feels like you can change their mind, and they don’t feel an active desire to hurt people.
Nazis typically aren’t that. Nazis are typically idiots who can’t face the real sources of pain in their life, so they direct their hatred of their lives and themselves to others. Same with manosphere incels, same with bigots of almost every kind. They want to hurt others, they want to break things, to be mad, because they’re hurt. But you can’t get them to see what they don’t want to see in the first place.
So you just feel bad for them, feel bad for others harmed by people like them, and hate yourself for feeling hatred for them because you get why they are doing it.
It isn’t fun and it’s not even fucking useful because it’s not like you being emotionally stressed out is helping anyone ever and you aren’t changing their minds.
Its a curse to feel irrationally compelled to talk to those who won’t listen because “maybe this time it’ll work” it doesn’t.
Edit: okay clearly I’m not in a very good place mentally right now, but I’m leaving this here. If anyone can relate, here’s some external reinforcement since you’ve likely said it to yourself and it doesn’t work: you do not need to feel compelled to feel bad for others constantly especially if it isn’t galvanizing you to take solid action to help. If your suffering stops you from functioning well enough to help anyone then it’s actually a bad thing to feel that empathy. So let yourself relax.
I’ll say it’s a 6-9 depending on my mood.
Sure this may sound ridiculous but it’s basic knowledge that studying your opponents viewpoints is the best way to counter them and get new insight yourself.
I don’t think this is necessarily empathy. I’ve read Hitler, Ilyin and Dugin, understood their arguments and point of view. If anything it made me less empathetic to them, seeing their vile hatred spilled on paper like that; but I agree that it is useful in practice to understand people who hate your guts.
To me, empathy means not only understanding the individual’s viewpoint, but moreso understanding how they got to it. This is how I can still slightly emphasize with any awful individuals, from nazis to billionaires: I understand that their viewpoint was formed by their position in the capitalist hellscape we fine ourselves in, and by incessant capitalist propaganda. If I was born in their stead and lived through their experiences, I would likely share similar ideas. This makes me more hopeful in the possibility of reform even for the worst of the worst; if a person was convinced of something, they can be convinced that it is wrong too; noone is born a nazi, and so noone is beyond hope in my opinion.
As for my family, they can be incessantly racist and homophobic, not to mention all the various small things like climate change conspiracies etc. I politely disagree with them and try to nudge them towards more inclusivity and empathy for others; we’ve never had a screaming argument despite holding very different opinions about things so dear to my heart. But yeah at times, especially when I’m in a bad mood, I also just shut down political conversations with them.
10 I guess, but just because I can doesn’t mean it’s fun to do all the time. Requires deliberate effort.
Not even sure hateful bigots are the hardest to empathize with. Everyone has hated someone or felt disgust before. That’s sort of an ‘in’ to the mindset.
I have a harder time with people like the Paul brothers or Mr. Beast. People who seem to have desires without beliefs.
One problem with empathizing with others’ viewpoints, truly, is realizing a lot of them have downright evil motivations. So, empathizing should make you despise them.
Often this “evil” like hate is born out of fear or some other vulnerability so you can find the underlying emotion and emphasize with that instead. Oh the other hand, what I find really hard to emphasize with in people with fascist viewpoints is their lack of empathy. Like when they are not acting out of being afraid or hurt or anything, just really clinging to privilege and being indifferent towards racialized people.
For me it’s like they’re using 12 year old reasoning and it’s easy to intuit that’s by choice. It’s something I associate with tourists especially who want to weaponize cluelessness and hospitality if they are Evil evil
By that criteria, 10. Like, if a Nazi wanted to seriously talk with me, I’d be fine with that. Glad, even. The thing is, they don’t usually do a whole lot of thinking or analysing, or they would have stopped being a Nazi pretty quickly.
It’s usually more about psychoanalysis - trying to figure out how their irrationality works. I spend a shit ton of time trying to get inside the head of the people who maintain the world’s problems. So, still 10.
Really depends if the viewpoints involve the oppression of other beings than near zero if not maybe 6.5.
I straight up told my father to drop politics or I’ll go home.
He wasnt thrilled about the ultimatum but he stopped. I got the cold shoulder for the remaining evening. :p
It depends on what those opposing viewpoints are. If they involve actively targeting and harming vulnerable people, I have no space at all for those viewpoints or the people that hold them.
For the other stuff, maybe a 7.
I mean I used to have opposite views because I grew up where a lot of that stuff is normalized and I didn’t question it until it was challenged, so I can understand being misinformed, hell I’m still misinformed sometimes. But if they’re not open to having their mind changed, and just want to hurt people, I have very little empathy for that.
If I’ve had enough time to wake up and I’m not upset about something else (and I think the only thing that really upsets me by now is a random argument with my wife or my mom), and if I determine you’re not arguing in bad faith but actually being entirely frank, probably a 9 or 10?
IME, evil people are rare, and what you’ll find more often than not is that they’re either slow or just straight up insane, so I can’t just go around being THE antisocial prick when people are simply sharing their mind without consciously trying to be hurtful, misleading or disruptive.
Me? Id like to think I’m a 6, I don’t cut family ties over their political opinions but I’m very likely to shut that down with a “I don’t want to speak politics with you”.
I’d say that’s 3 or low 4. I think you need to define the middle stages of this scale more clearly.
9.5 However, just because I can doesn’t mean I have to. I had discussions with a traditional Nazi, with an antisemite, with Corona deniers, … I’ve studied philosophy which teaches you to take other viewpoints to understand the inconsistencies.
But doing it for a long time is extremely exhausting which is why I refuse to discuss renewable energy with my father; who’s not categorically wrong on that topic but narrow minded and only educates himself as much as needed to believe some convenient half-truths.
