

Empathy and tolerance aren’t the same thing.
You should not tolerate intolerance.
All of that, ALL OF IT, is completely tangential to the concept of empathy.
I get it, you’ve got a lot of hate. You SHOULD hate Nazis. It’s an uncomfortable challenge to have the capacity for empathy for someone you hate.
And like, I don’t understand how people can’t recognize the value of empathy even for a strictly pragmatic purposes. A byproduct of people with strong empathy skills is they’re good at predicting what someone is going to do.
Honestly, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid if you mentally explore someone else’s situation from that persons perspective, feel the way they feel… That what? YOU’LL suddenly realize YOU’RE actually a Nazi too? Whoopsie Poopsie? Give yourself a little more credit than that.
Anyhow, you and Elon should go for beers sometime and just agree with eachother all night about how you shouldn’t empathize with people.
Edit: also, for the record, the right wing appeals to the paradox of tolerance to justify what they do to undocumented people. They broke the law, the social contract, so the law doesn’t apply to them (insert hillbilly laugh).
Yes, I am disagreeing with human pattern recognition. People absolutely do not work towards their rational self interests. Ayn Rand is/was wrong. People have been voting against their own self interests for decades. Centuries. People ALREADY are reaping the results of their actions. What do you think leopardsatemyface is? How many of those stories conclude with “still a trump supporter tho”?
What is empathy? I don’t have some wild definition. Cambridge is fine “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.”
Set aside any moral justification for empathy if you want, it’s not even required to make the case for why you should have it.
If you want to change someone’s behaviors, ESPECIALLY ones that are from your perspective irrational, you need to understand why they’re doing them in the first place. Empathy is how you can understand that.
If you don’t have empathy (Like Ayn Rand, for example) you’ll end up with a wildly inaccurate model for someones behaviors (as in, they’re working towards their rational self interests), and as a result your strategies for making a difference is going to be ineffective.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”
STRICTLY from a PRAGMATIC angle, empathy is a critical tool.