Empathy Can be a Dangerous Thing

In the Stephen King book From a Buick 8, a group of Pennsylvania State Highway Patrolmen (and one woman) find themselves in the possession of a very strange late model Buick. Apart from being impervious to damage and having no discernible working parts (although it does, somehow, operate), the Buick has a very unsettling habit of occasionally disgorging lifeforms from it's trunk, lifeforms both mind-bendingly alien and freakishly repulsive. In a chapter approaching the finale of the book, a small group of patrolmen meet the apotheosis of these horrors, a creature that is obviously the dominant life-form in that bizarre, alternate world from which the Buick draws. It is indescribably awful (King himself seems to have a somewhat difficult time with the task) but as the group of terrified and repulsed humans attack and eventually kill the monstrosity, something extremely unsettling happens to them. As the thing is dying, it looks at them. One of the patrolmen describes:

In the center of my head, I saw myself. I saw all of us standing around in a circle and looking down, looking like murderers at the grave of their victim, and I saw how strange and alien we were. How horrible we were. In that moment I felt its awful confusion. Not its fear, because it wasn't afraid. Not its innocence, because it wasn't innocent. Or guilty for that matter. What it was was confused. Did it know where it was? I don't think so. Did it know why we were killing it? Yes, it knew that much. We were doing it because we were so different, so different and horrible that its many eyes could hardly see us, could hardly hold onto our images as we surrounded it, screaming and chopping and cutting and hitting.

All this just to state a simple but maybe understated fact: a little empathy can go a long way, and it can be extremely unsettling.

My own experiences with empathy, ironically, foster a certain shallaqued superficiality rather than a more understanding worldview. I don't know-- this is going to sound extremely strange to some people, methinks, but maybe it'll help if I say I am an artist and (to a lesser extent) a writer of fiction. The act of creating fiction is, in its most basic form, the act of trying to see the world through other people's eyes and determining how they think and what moves them.

I think I must be eerily good at that, even if I ain't necessarily a great writer. Which I ain't.

Here's an example: I was in the kitchen a few minutes ago pouring myself a cup of coffee. We have a young woman that comes a few times a week to play with our two kids while my wife runs errands (or just plain runs), and she happened to be in the kitchen as well getting something mushy to feed* the baby. She is new to our family, and we all like her immensely, but I know very little about her apart from the fact that she is very good with the kids, easy to talk to, and has very good references. As she left the room, I was wondering about her story, her life thus far. She has a look that tells some of that story for her, and I can appreciate that it apparently hasn't all been perfectly splendid. I wondered what our home and lifestyle looks like to her, how it feels to be in our house with us and our kids. And then, for the tiniest sliver of a microsecond, almost an imperceptible blip of time, I seemed to see myself through her eyes: somewhat aloof, a tiny bit arrogant, older and distant but a little reassuringly immature, oblivious of the hair sticking up in the back, sniffling a little with a cold-- sort of a big, monolithic statue of a cartoon character, Bullwinkle maybe-- generally amusing and harmless, as long as it doesn't actully fall on you. And immediately after that moment of (what felt like) perfect perceptual empathy, I forgot, just for a fraction of a sliver of a second, which one of us I was!

I'm not nuts. Really. I don't think.

But is this entirely normal? Do other people feel that sometimes? That moment of perfect (if invented) sync with someone else's view of the world? This is a source of, among other things, terrible vanity for me, because I know what I look like to the people around me at any given time. I can look at them and imagine exactly how I appear to them. And the sad, pathetic, hopeless truth about me (poser that I am) is that I adjust myself- pose, posture, expression- to enhance that perception as much as I can. I don't like this about myself, mind you. I'd like to be utterly oblivious to the maintenance of my image and other people's perceptions of me. I'd like to practice more often the freedom to just be comfortable being me and forget there is anyone else around at all. And I am trying. But it doesn't come naturally. I take some comfort in the belief that that doesn't come naturally for pretty much anybody, I think.

But the annoying thing is, this "ability" to look at the world through someone else's eyes has not done much to make me a more generally empathetic and understanding person. I am pretty damn judgemental, in the classic "you bettah believe I'll throw that first stone" sense. Again, I don't like this about myself, so thank you for not pointing it out. Lately, I have begun attempting to use this "superpower" for good instead of, well, if not evil, at least the superficial. I have begun trying to look at people that strike me as repulsive (murderers of innocence, the haters, the mindlessly violent) and seeing the world through their eyes.

The result has shaken my world and begun a very, very uncomfortable (but necessary) shift in my perception of the world, of justice, of good and evil. I have found that I can see, just a bit, the world through the eyes of the most heinous criminal. What I have seen is that, rather than being the spontaneous anomolies of violence that I found it easy to believe these people were, they are more accurately just the tip of the tentacle, the knife in the hand of a long line of abuse, hate, violence, neglect, and inconceivable pain. I hate it, but what I see through the eyes of these people is that before they were perpetrators, they were victims. It isn't an excuse, but it makes a difference to know that these people, for the most part, weren't equipped for life like I was. They are broken, and they are passing on brokenness. They know right from wrong, I think, but they barely know how to choose between them. They don't know how not to hurt.

It doesn't mean justice shouldn't be done, or that these individuals cannot bear the blame for their horrible choices. It just means they don't bear it alone. Not by a long shot. And the sad, ugly, hateful, abominable truth is that most of the people who bear the responsibility for these tragic crimes will never bear the blame for them. Justice just doesn't work that way. It can't.

But oh if it could.

Anyway, wow, how much more comfortable my life was when I thought that the evils of society could be solved just by chopping off the ends of the tentacles. How much more satisfying it was to execute judgement on the murderers and haters when I didn't have to feel sorry for them, when I didn't know they were just the inevitable end result of a long chain of horror, much of which they experienced themselves. This must be what it means to live in a "fallen" world: to know that hate and evil doesn't just erupt spontaneously from nothing, but is instead cultivated richly and at great length in the fertilizer of humanity's essential selfishness, pettiness and pride.

I don't know what I am going to eventually do with this dawning realization, but I do know that a lot of my assumptions and confident assertions about life were at least skewed, if not completely, willfully lazy.

See what I mean? A little empathy can be a very dangerous thing.

* read: rub all over her face and let her play with