A bit about empathy

Empathy is one of the many parameters that make up who we are. If you are very empathetic you have probably cried in the cinema at some movies. If you are not empathetic at all you might be a psychopath and that would be bad. We need empathy in any functioning society. It allows us to to come to Win-Win situations. It also stops us from doing horrible things to others. About 5% of the population is psychopathic. Fortunately psychopaths can not spread their genes very well because they are not good at maintaining relations and if they get children they will be certainly disadvantaged by their upbringing. You could call that a negative feedback loop. So a heathy society has build in defences against psychopaths. But like any feedback loop there are external factors that influence the process. I guess you can see where this is going if you look at the nature of this blog. Can you imagine that there is a culture driven by a religion where discrimination is a doctrine. For instance discrimination against woman among others. Woman are seen as second class citizens, their witness account could for instance count only for half of that of a man and they are generally oppressed. If such woman steps out of line she might insult her family or perhaps an entire village. If such society is primitive enough families may feel that their honour is compromised by their daughter or wife for instance. Fortunately despite the theoretical existence of a backward culture that assumes it possible a daughter or wife can bring dishonour over her family by behaving inappropriately and then deserving death there is empathy. Despite having their honour trampled on, empathy will stop those family members from doing horrible things to their daughters or wives. But what about if those backward cultures have Psychopaths among them? That would not be unrealistic since 5% of the population are psychopathic. A daughter or a wife of a Psychopath in such backward culture driven by their religion could then theoretically die a horrible death. Not only that, the perpetrators would also have a moral high ground. It would be easy to see how such society would not flourish. Despite the fact that the majority of empathetic members of such society would like to get on with their lives and love their daughters and wives, there is a critical and very destructive amount of psychopaths among them who do a lot of damage without the checks and balances of, for instance, a healthy Western society.

I always try to explain things for my self. How can you kill your own daughter in the name of honour? How can you fly a plane in a building in the name of religion? Normally when I am puzzled by a complex issue I analyse it and build a hypothesis. If the hypothesis is in conflict with data, then it is discarded. But as long as there is no known data that conflicts with the hypothesis, I work with it as if it is true. In most cases it allows the root cause to be found. The above is my hypothesis to the origin of terrorism and honour killing. You need a culture or a religion that makes it acceptable and you need a psychopath (or even psychopaths to come together). One of the two is not enough and that explains why a violent religion does not make all their members violent. Fortunately, the majority has enough empathy to go against their own religion.