As kids, we used our imaginations a lot to help us role play. Actors take classes so they can learn to act like other people. So they can role play. But we learn to role play from what we know and what we know isn't always that genuine. So our information is bias.
Cowboys and Indians! Wait.. you mean Native Americans? It's not so simple to be politically correct and try to understand eachother, in the US, when we are so different. Yet we live by the same legal rules but our social norms are different.
So I ask you this. How can you assume to know how other people feel when you yourself have not been subject to their experiences or enviornments? If we are products of our raising.. then how can we ever truely know how a person of a different raising.. feels?
Here's my formula of thought.
I don't logically see any way to know how another person feels unless you yourself have experienced the same stimuli while maintaining the same emotional capacity. You can't honestly, tell me you believe a psychopath and Scitzo are going to react the same to something dramatic happening. More than likely, their reactions would be different. However, the psychopath can munipulate you into believing they are emotional.
But regardless.. if you did not know that one person was a Scitzo and you did not know that the other person was a psychopath.. and all your knowledge was based off of "how you would feel if that dramatic event happened".. than logically there is no way you can honestly have empathy for that person. Not unless you are a gifted psychiatrist.
I further justify my arguement that a general Empathy does not exist.
Victims helping other vitims because they both know how it feels. I do believe in some conditions they can share an empathy for one another but how they emotionally handle things is linked to how they were mentally conditioned as a child. People of simular backgroundss are more likely to have an understanding of one another than an outsider claiming empathy.
Also I'll pull the RAPE card. Can a man really know what it's like to be raped? How about pregnant and have a baby born from your body? Does a man experience such wonders? Is it not vial that a man assumes such things?
I believe empathy exists between people who have common denominators but everyone else.. it's sympathy they feel. They don't really know how it feels. They just assume crap and that right there.. is very offensive to me. As a vitim of violent crimes.. I am deepply offended when people, who have never experienced my suffering, try to tell me they understand how I feel. F you!
What really disturbs me is this society, in the US, is so used to lying to itself that people are actually arrogent enough to believe they can feel empathy for people they have never met. People lie to themselves about feelings. At least that is how it seems. Idon't think people really know what empathy means and they are misusing it in an attempt to seem more compassionate but really.. it makes them look like complete low life pieces of trash to me. I'd rather have sympathy bleed on me than arrogent sympathy, assume, it knows how I feel.. and tries to feel that way as well.. people are sick.
Am I a sensetive boy about the word empathy? Yes, most vitims are and those people who torment us.. there's a special place in Hell for people who torment the children of God.