Not understanding the difference between empathy and sympathy also means they can’t understand how empathy is a strength that can be used to your advantage.

Is empathy a strategic imperative? A review essay

Despite its softer connotations, empathy is hard, requiring strategists to confront misperceptions and false assumptions, and overcome individual egos and national hubris. This article reviews the literature, examining some of the gaps and costs incurred. Whilst strategic empathy may have transactional and instrumental connotations, it suggests that the concept holds greater potential to transform strategy. Used wisely, it offers an ethos and means to put people first, foster greater security, and offer innovative approaches to contemporary challenges.

What a great concept to teach boys/young adults who are still developing or struggling with emotional intelligence.

The world is better without him.

Spoken like an undiagnosed autistic. If only there were signs

Empathy is about understanding where someone is coming from. Plain and simple.

Charlie Kirk had no empathy because he had no interest in understanding where people were coming from when he debated with them. He was always on the attack and never tried to understand his opponent.

He was the apogee of the thoughts and prayers kind of people.

Empathy for me and sympathy for thee kind of people.

I am starting to think that this guy was an asshole.

So the rest of the quote reveals a kind of sociopathic narcissism in which he argues that empathy doesn’t exist, so instead you just need to passively look down on others.

The context makes it clear that he does not mean “sympathy” in it’s “i support you” meaning but the “you have my sympathy” - aka “thoughts and prayers” - meaning.

The full context makes it even worse.

Empathy isn’t just about feeling, it’s about perspective. Not only do you attempt to understand the feeling, you try to understand the situation the person is in that led to those feelings. Sympathy is acknowledging something bad happened to someone, but that doesn’t mean you personally appreciate the emotions of the other person.

This is something similar to what Sam Harris said.

Sam Harris advocates that empathy is the wrong metric by which to evaluate helping someone, and we should use compassion instead.

The difference? Empathy can be highjacked and relies on intuition. You see a news story about some little girl in your city who lost her arm in a dog attack, you feel more for empathy for her than a child in Africa whose whole family was just slaughtered by militant Christians.

So, instead, we should use compassion as our north-star. We can use logic to guide us to making choices which lead to preferable outcomes for those who need it most.

None of this relates to Kirk though because he’s a pseudointellectual grifter who failed to demonstrate empathy for anyone who doesn’t fit into his Christian nationalist world view. That’s my two cents.

As he said, Empathy requires, well…Empathy. the ability to recognize what a person MIGHT be feeling. It’s reading someone, and trying to relate. It doesn’t mean literally reading their mind, and channeling their emotions like a Vulcan Mind Meld.

On the other hand, Sympathy can simply mean pity, especially to someone like him. He can’t recognize your pain, all he can do is feel superior that he’s not in pain.

It’s the basic definition of Liberal vs Republican. Liberals (general term, not Neo Liberals) are concerned with society, Republicans are concerned with themselves.

Now that you mention, I don’t really feel a bullet in my neck. Cool.

Charlie Kuck dropped out of college after 1 semester and it shows.

This is the kind of simplistic 1-2-3 logic they use all the time to destroy entire concepts like… human empathy. Troglodytes around the world will walk around with this phrase in their back pockets for years. Thanks, dead guy.

Sympathy means you are practicing concern for others from your own perspective. Usually that means relating to someone through your own similar experiences. For example, when someone loses their job, your remember how you felt when you lost your job or when you felt inadequate or betrayed, or when you faced financial struggles. And you sympathize with them through those shared circumstances. This is a great thing, and you should absolutely do this.

Empathy means you take someone’s perspective to try to understand how they feel. This is of course, impossible to do perfectly as you are not them. But the point of it to step outside of your own lens and your low personal experiences and get a glimpse of how they feel from their own experiences. This is of particular value when you do not have a comparable experience for what they are going through to pull from. Like a white person in America has never had the experience of being racial profiled by the police. Any attempt to sympathize would be ignorant at best, insulting at worst. Your experience getting pulled over for speeding is not the same as being pulled over for seeming suspicious for having your skin color in a given place and time. Practicing empathy is trying to understand what that must feel like for them from their perspective and given all of the experiences they must have had in their life. Again, this is going to be imperfect, but if services a purpose in making you understand the experiences and world views of others that are different than you.

That is why the right hatesthe concept of empathy. A) It means that their experience and viewpoint is not objective. B) It means that they are expected to practice seeing others as individuals in whole, not as charactictures and stereotypes. C) It means that they are faced with the realities of bias, bigotry, privilege, and systemic racism that does exist and is experienced by everyone differently. And D) It means that their gut reactions, their inherent feelings of fear, disgust, anger, and hatred at those different to themselves needs to be challenged and seen for the bigotry it is.