This Book Will Make You Kinder by Henry James Garrett

Author:Henry James Garrett [Garrett, Henry James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Your empathy can be limited when you believe things that aren’t true, but also when you don’t know things that are. Not knowing enough about the experiences of someone or some group, or about how your actions impact their experiences, can switch your empathy off.

Perhaps it can’t hurt you, but what you don’t know is often what causes you to hurt others.

Let’s imagine you’re part of a close friendship group, and one day, as part of some cute inside joke, you and some of your friends assign each member of that gang an animal-themed nickname; you take to calling one of your friends Rabbit and another Lion. But now imagine that one of your friends, who wasn’t there that day but is now commonly referred to as Dog, was the victim of a traumatic incident in their childhood in which several dogs attacked them.

You and your friends don’t know about the attack, but each time someone calls to them, “Hey, Dog!” they experience a moment of panic and return to the horror of that moment.

In this example, you act as you do only because of your ignorance of your friend’s experience. If you’d known just a little bit more, you wouldn’t have done so, because you would have been able to imagine and empathize with the suffering caused by that nickname.

It would have been difficult in this case for you to know any better. We wouldn’t want to describe your motives as cruel; your ignorance was so unavoidable that no one is really culpable for your friend’s suffering.

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