December 19, 2:46am
Realization: Broaden your definition of self. There’s a social element to all of our thinking from the very beginning, necessarily. As I begin to realize this with more clarity, the connection between people becomes a crucial part of trying to understand even the most basic thoughts in our own head, and certainly in anyone else’s. We co-create everything we know. The language we use to communicate our understandings back to ourselves isn’t ours; it’s a shared language from a shared human experience that arose from all of us, everywhere. We literally are each other, in a cognitive sense.
Learning takes place by pathways of communication, communicating our experiences and realizations and understandings and more back to ourselves, and even more so by communicating the same to other people. In order to truly communicate, a person has to synchronize what they’re thinking and feeling to someone else in that moment. To hear someone, a person has to synchronize their experience and points of reference with the other person’s– in a sense by being them, for that moment. This is the link: learning and creating and becoming and growing is an empathic act. We don’t learn by watching math being done, we must do the math, and experience the thing itself as an internal logical process that we will (as a verb) into action. We don’t learn by watching other people, or watching words fly out of their mouths at us, we learn by engaging with the source of the words, entering their experiences in that moment, possibly living them for that shared point in time. In that moment the existential space of one person is in reality a shared space. For me to respond to something you’re trying to communicate, I have to know what made you think or say the thing you did because that’s part of what you’re saying. You can’t take the person out of the idea, you can take the words away from the assembler because though the words have a shared meaning, my sunrise isn’t yours by word alone. You didn’t see the one I saw that time, the one in my mind when I conjure “sunrise” as a metaphoric description of a feeling I have. I have to walk through your logic to truly engage with you in a conversation, only then is our experience shared and the communication fully received.
That kind of interaction creates empathy. In today’s society, we don’t do that any more. We surround ourselves with people who already agree with us. We choose our news based on the spin we like. For empathy to be built, people need to have real conversations, and that necessarily consists of experiencing difference. When you engage and take the side or perspective of a person you disagree with, to see the world as they do for the purpose of understanding what they’re saying fully, only then can the communication truly take place. By not engaging with people different than ourselves, it’s easier to just say they’re idiots. It used to be the case that people lived with and experienced diversity of view on a daily basis. In the 50s and 60s there were 3-4 big TV networks and everyone went to the same public spaces and lived out there amongst each other. Today, there are 300 channels and it’s possible to surround yourself only with media and people who think exactly like you do, and it becomes a positive feedback loop that can shield against any chance of understanding reality. People today voluntarily build an us and them construct because they’re too weak to confront difference and too cowardly to build empathy with those whose perspective differs from ours. The prospect of entering the mind and world of someone vastly different from the self has become too terrifying and thus people avoid it, clinging to their various mechanisms for managing the terror, whether it’s religion, fuckface culture or politics. That’s why our entire society is divided as it is, and that’s what historically has led to even unthinkable chasms, such as brother vs. brother civil war such as we had 150 years ago.
The more we understand the value of what empathy is, the more reason we’ll have to want to create the kinds of interactions that build empathy– the taking of perspectives, and the temporary occupation of another person’s mind, and the broadening of our self definitions. Social diversity is valuable because it adds to our own understandings and gives us the opportunities we need to see the world from vantage points and understandings different from what we can achieve on our own.
When I’ve classified myself as you who are so different from me as we communicate together, helping you is helping us, because at that moment I am you. The more we practice empathic interaction, especially the difficult kinds, the stronger we all are in the face of everything else, because we’re all on the same team.
