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Notes -
So that “white woman cries over random injustice in the world” archetype that is often joked about. Eg a girl cries over the rainforest being destroyed… why does it only seem to be white women? I actually can’t recall ever seeing a black woman online crying about some injustice or harm which doesn’t affect them personally. I wonder: while it may be laughed off as pure naïveté, could it actually be evidence of a greater natural disposition toward empathy?
Just to test my intuition, I looked into who is most likely to run animal shelters or participate in animal rights and it is white women. If you look at animal rights protestor photos online they are almost always white. This over representation is of course criticized online and called white supremacism. Yet what better test is there of empathy than if you are emotional about the plight of animals? One’s emotional response to the suffering of animals is a consequence of their ability to feel the shared feeling of intelligent beings. IMO the political aspirations which follow from these feelings are flawed, but that’s a somewhat distinct question from whether it effortlessly leads to empathy.
Sociopaths are notorious for being more fond of animals than they are of people. #NotAllWhiteWomen, of course.
But if I were to try to spin an opposing narrative, maybe as one graduates from ignoring the comatose drug addict on the street, all the way up to viewing one's political outgroup as vermin, somewhere along the line all the repressed empathy finds an outlet in animals. Animals can never truly deserve to be hated, not like people. They're sweet and innocent and aren't capable of knowing any better.[1] Whereas That Guy over there knows exactly what he did, and he deserves everything that's coming to him, and if you call me a "mind reader", you're next against the wall.
[1] Except pit bulls, of course, which should all be killed with extreme prejudice. Invasive species, too. Unless they're cute.
On the other hand, isn’t one of the classic sociopathic tells that as children they torture insects or other animals, drown cats, rip wings off bugs etc? Most people who like their dog like their dog more than the median stranger, almost certainly to the point of picking the former in a trolley problem scenario (if they could get away with it).
Good point. Maybe it's the same thing as with people, where the sociopaths turn the empathy on and off whenever convenient. And we happen to notice the contrasts between the pets that they love and the people that they couldn't care less about, and we don't see all the other animals that they also couldn't care less about.
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