Empathy: A Micro-Lesson
We are all capable of learning to be human beings.
I’m Jen, the founder of Human Tutor. I’m developing a curriculum to teach empathy, and I have a micro-lesson I’d like to share.
(I am brand new to editing videos, so I promise these will improve with time.)
Men are people.
That’s it. That’s the insight. Not some men. All men. Even the ones who do harm. Even the most soulless billionaire (acknowledging their humanity is in no way offering absolution for their crimes, but they are human,
and they are no better than us.)
All of us, including men, are just people. If you’re TL:DR inclined, you can skip the rest, but I’m going to unpack what I mean.
There’s a tendency in some feminist spaces to wonder about how men think or why they do the things they do. (Men often wonder similar things about women.)
The thing is, people actually tend to behave in fairly predictable ways. They govern their lives according to whatever values they have internalized, guided by whoever they see themselves to be, and influenced by the environments they move through and the people they encounter.
One of the most insidious mechanisms in our society is that it teaches us what it means to be people. It teaches us what are acceptable ways to be in public, what are acceptable interests to have, employment to pursue, relationships to have, what modes of living are allowed. It teaches us what lines we must learn to color within to get by. In our case living in the imperial core, we tend to learn some inherently violent ideas about what “justice” means, and we tend to internalize the thinking that it’s okay to do bad things to “bad” people, especially if the government are the ones doing the bad things. See also: mass incarceration, the death penalty, raiding homeless encampments, institutionalizing folks with disabilities, terrorizing immigrants, etc. And to be clear, even if you don’t support any of those things, many people probably also haven’t generally expended a great deal of effort toward stopping them from happening. That’s consent, backed up by a lifetime of being assured by the people in power that they only punish bad people and that the same can happen to you if you speak up.
When it comes to young men, this system is set to a default of causing lasting emotional and psychological trauma that affects their entire lives. What we’re all living in right now is the result of that trauma, sustained over generations. That generational trauma was passed down like family heirlooms, encoded into our DNA as part of who we are. We’re the descendants of the people who survived by adapting to the system. Now, targeted algorithms are an accelerant, calculated to guide people to content that promotes anger and maligns the idea of empathy and social learning. Algorithms cultivate angry, shallow, reactionary political views because those views protect people in power and the system of power that keeps them living in luxury on the backs of our blood, sweat, and tears.
A lot of boys in the US grow up being taught (whether directly or indirectly) that emotion is a weakness to be avoided. They learn that masking emotions is expected in all but very few, very specific circumstances. Anger is the emotion that’s encouraged the most, excused the most.
Boys will be boys, after all.
But I think many of us know men who have done the work to unpack and understand this trauma of being denied connection with their own bodies and emotions so they can stop the cycle of violence. So they can raise kids who feel valued and seen and loved as real, whole people who don’t need to edit who they are for fear of exclusion or abandonment. Kids who learn it’s okay to be “weird”, who learn that sometimes you have to cry, that control is the opposite of love. Kids who learn to accept themselves as they are are less likely to feel compelled to control others around them because their foundational relationships were not based in control and obedience, but in learning, love, and cooperation.
Love is trust. Trust that your feelings are understood and valued. Trust that everyone involved is being real and honest with one another. Trust that everyone involved has similar understandings of the nature of the relationship in question. Trust that everyone is involved of their own free will, without coercion or duress. In moments of doubt, love reaches out for connection to understand what’s happening. Control sets parameters to maintain in order to monitor and correct the situation, mistrusting the other parties to resolve the matter to their satisfaction.
It’s almost impossible to have empathy for others until you have compassion for yourself. Our sense of self-trust has been deliberately undermined, which makes self-love and compassion more of a challenge. Being told “you’re fine” when you have a strong emotional reaction is undermining. When we don’t trust ourselves, when we don’t trust who we inherently are, we often resort to control to try to make ourselves conform. That’s a survival response because our society offers something that looks like safety in conformity. Security. Power.
Our society offers (particularly white, cisgender, heterosexual, relatively affluent) men a lot of control if they follow the rules. That list of qualifiers is the first set of rules. That’s the “ideal” “normal” state of what a man is to this system. Other rules: trust those in authority; protect the image of your masculinity, maintained according to their guidelines; value the “right” things (power, success, money, consumption). Earn enough money, and the rules become optional. Gain enough power over people, you can decide what the rules are for others. Be successful, and create a legacy for generations to come.
Women have rules in the patriarchal system as well. We are meant to be submissive, to trust the authority generally meant to be afforded to the men in our lives and communities, to back them up no matter what, to be small, to be “nice”. No matter what we think or how we feel, that is never meant to override our “betters”.
How then, can we be surprised when young men decide it’s natural to hate women? One of the rules, after all, is that they’re inherently more worthy of being invested with authority than we are. We all constantly receive that messaging from all angles. We are bombarded with images centered around the pedophilic gaze promoted by our ruling class, images that depict women as infantilized, sexualized, interchangeable objects rated on qualities like “hotness” or “value”. This is also why so many women “don’t like” other women. “Women are too catty. Women can’t be trusted. I’d rather hang out with dudes because there’s less drama.” It doesn’t really seem to be true, as women continue doing uncompensated emotional labor for their communities and for men in particular. Those of us who refuse, or who deviate from the norms we’ve been taught about what women are supposed to be, are bad people.
And in our society, you can do anything to bad people.
In the capitalist system, people who don’t pay their rent are bad people, and they can be thrown out into the street. The state can take their children away. If they try to organize with other unhoused people to survive, their encampment can be raided and everything thrown in the trash. Our society is obsessed with throwing anything problematic away instead of dealing with the underlying issues. It’s why we’re so overrun with both physical, industrial trash and emotional, psychological trash.
This is part of the fundamental dehumanization of our society, and it exists to promote the idea that men and women have separate interests that are in conflict with one another. That’s true inside the system of patriarchal whiteness. Our interests are separate and very much at odds.
But fundamentally, once we learn to see these systems for what they are and think beyond them, we see that our interests are actually very much aligned. Food, water, shelter, community. The people who taught men to hate women are the same ones controlling social media algorithms and imagery in the media and organizing vast human trafficking networks to feed their lust for cruelty. They’re the same ones committing genocide around the world so we can have cheap tech devices and still pad their profit margins. They’re the same ones contracting prison slave labor for the jobs “no one wants to work” anymore.
I believe understanding and getting back in touch with our inherent humanity is the only path forward. I believe it’s life-changing in spectacular ways.
But it requires all of us.
That means no more throwing men in the trash. It means no more throwing people away. Convicts, addicts, disabled folks, people with mental illness, unhoused folks, queer and trans folks—we all belong in society. But we have to get to work urgently teaching people that there are better ways to live than endless consumption with bursts of targeted outrage as a pressure release valve for increasingly surveilled, controlled, confined lives.
We have to show people a better world is possible, that they can love themselves and be valued as human beings if they are willing to be human beings. If they’re willing to discard the scuffed, worn mask of whiteness and reclaim their actual history.
It won’t be easy, but hard things can be worth doing.
That’s as true on a personal level as it is on a societal level.
We are all capable of learning to be human beings.
Yes, even men.