Thanks sharkfucker420

Benn Jordan is one of my favorite musicians, YouTubers, and people in the world. Highly recommended

Speaking of Mulder, Lynch was a gem of a person that this sorry world didn’t deserve.

YOU’LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP, HEARING’S GONE. GOT THESE THINGS CRANKED UP TO THE MAX

WHAT?

this is certainly a post of all time

My experience with empathy is that empathy isn’t an act, it’s an emotion. Your descriptions track more closely with charity, heroism and justice - behaviors that are certainly closely linked with empathy. But I’m confident that the best definition of empathy explicitly does not include behaviors.

On a tangent, it’s incredibly self-destructive to take ownership of others’ feelings, especially negative ones. To support my statement, it’s predicated on empathy, but exhibits non-constructive behaviors.

Not really making an argument, just want to speak precisely.

Empathy used to justify or enable harmful actions is toxic. Like, say, people who use at an excuse for retribution, or people who do something harmful to soothe their own empathy, or people who enable another’s toxic activities out of empathy.

Empathy and compassion aren’t very well-defined, but I have always understood empathy to be about sharing in another’s feelings, good or bad. Compassion is a little more distanced, it’s about understanding another’s feelings and simultaneously being considerate about it.

Empathy can be very powerful, and introduce feelings and emotions into someone who doesn’t know how to deal with them well.

BTW I’m not trying to make a case against empathy, not at all. But I think about empathy and compassion a lot, and while I still want to champion them as virtues, they can be just as complex and subtle as any other human experience. I think our lack of nuanced understanding of empathy and compassion is a root cause of a lot of human problems, especially recently.

There’s a form of empathy I, and I think some of my friends, experience by being raised by selfish parents. We’re hyper-aware of others’ feelings, dread upsetting anyone, and take personal responsibility for other peoples’ unhappiness (all of it, even if we didn’t have any influence).

There’s another form, that’s kind of like a complement to retribution and revenge. A person goes overboard trying to soothe their own empathy-inspired unhappiness that they to go absurd ends to address the source of unhappiness. Maybe like PETA, or people experiencing moral panic.

Another form that comes to mind is the mother from Requiem for a Dream - enablers. She knows her son is an addict, she knows that he’s constantly stealing her TV to sell for drug money, but she dutifully buys her TV back from the pawn shop every time, because she can’t say no to her son.

I suppose, taking drastic action to soothe one’s own empathy, and not addressing the real source of unhappiness, can be pretty toxic, especially when used to manipulate, coerce and sway others.

So, this is controversial, but when I hear “toxic masculinity” I understand that it means that not all masculinity is toxic, but masculinity can have toxic forms. In the interest of using precise language, I do believe that, in the realm of all possibilities, there can conceivably be toxic forms of empathy.

Now, I don’t think that left/progressive ideals are toxic in general, and certainly aren’t toxic when they’re based in empathy and compassion. And I realize that the “side” that coined the phrase “toxic empathy” is also the side that thinks “toxic masculinity” is an absolute phrase. So it would make sense that right/conservative people would think “oh we’ll call ideals we don’t like toxic, like the libs do with masculinity” without any deeper understanding.

Just want to be pedantic to try to keep the capital-D Discourse on the nature of empathy from becoming black-and-white polarized.

A bad workman blames their tools

FTFY