The Ability to Empathize

                Recently, a heavily armed young man strode into a midnight showing of a movie and commenced to indiscriminately shoot innocent theater goers, killing 12 and wounding scores of others.  

                This past weekend, another man—referred to as a white supremacist, shot seven Sikh worshipers and wounded others.  

Lest events like this become too commonplace so as not to give one pause, I wanted to briefly share my thoughts and feelings about these senseless acts and what I figure answers the “why”; how could someone do something so heartless and cruel?

                As I watched cable news reporting about one of the the killing sprees, one of the stations asked one of their pundits, a forensic psychologist, to opine about the “why.”   This particular man has over 20 years of experience, much of it attempting to figure out motives and reasons of mass murderers.  Because I am a psychologist in my own right, I was interested in what he had to say.  What he said really rang true and made sense to me, especially because in my profession I am an observer of behavior.

                  Simply stated, he posited that the reason why people can commit atrocities is that they have lost their ability to empathize.   Combining his explanation with my own, some time in their past, something happened in their lives—likely in their childhood—that emotionally hurt them to such a devastating degree that for self-preservation they had to shut down emotionally; to bury that hurt and dissociate from it because it was too painful to feel.  When one shuts down that feeling completely, one doesn’t feel (and doesn’t want to feel).   

                 Sometimes the loss of empathy can occur because of a political or religious belief.  Such was the case with the terrible tyrants of the 20^th century like Josef Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Dung, Sadaam Hussein, Charles Taylor, Idi Amin, and Papa Doc Duvalier who were responsible for the slaughter of well over 100 million people.  They likely considered the people they slaughtered to be less than human.  They and those that carried out their evil killings lost their ability to empathize.   I would submit feeling empathy is a God-given ability, but in them it was completely extinguished. 

                Empathy involves me acknowledging that you have a right to be.  It involves caring for others.   It involves an emotional attachment with those around us and valuing them.  It involves feeling on some level what others might be feeling, and respecting that.  

                Losing our ability to empathize as humans is a terrible thing.  I am convinced that the men who perpetrated these barbarisms have lost that humanity.  We who remain hopefully do feel empathy, and our hearts are saddened and we mourn those whose mortal lives were snuffed out and whose families will be scarred for the rest of their lives by these evil acts.