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Are we engaging in a political contest with people whose brains don't work like ours? Failing to understand one way or another will put us in a strategically weak situation.
IMO empathy is one of a number of human personality traits which can be placed on continua. Bell curves are probably oversimplifications, but might serve as a starting point for discussion, with "neurotypical" being at the middle of the curve. Note however that people a couple of standard deviations in either direction can be perfectly functional socially. I'd also like to avoid any nature/nurture controversies--the empirical observations are the same either way, and where people fall on the continua certainly owes as much to life experience as to inborn traits. Let's consider three distributions of traits--cheerfulness/depression, social intelligence, and empathy.
Cheerfulness/depression continuum
Grey pit dwellers-->wet blankets/sourballs-->neurotypical wearers of slightly rose-tinted glasses-->terminally perky
A few years back, one of my coworkers had an article hung in his cubicle describing the job performance of cheerful people versus sourballs, which concluded that the sourballs had more realistic perceptions of complex problems and were more likely to come up with deeper, more thorough and more creative analyses of problems. The terminally perky were far more superficial. Depressed people, when evaluating their own job performances, tended to agree with others' evaluations of them--they did not underrate themselves; their performance self-evaluations were simply accurate. More optimistic people had higher opinions of themselves than their coworkers did.
It's well known that optimism and cheerfulness enhance the immune system and lead to better recovery from a whole spectrum of diseases, so individuals will be selected for that trait. The human norm is probably therefore having a somewhat rosy tint to perceptions of reality. However, it may well be that the tribe needs at least a few people to perceive more accurately what is really going on, and to more creatively deal with new situations, so there would be group selection for this. The price paid is that a few on the far end of the spectrum will periodically get trapped in the grey pit, the dark night of the soul. (To the extent that genetics is involved, it probably works like the distribution of sickle cell hemoglobin genes in malaria-prone regions. The price for having half the population malaria-resistant is having 25% of the population with sickle cell anemia.)
Social intelligence continuum
Expert dolphin-like divers in the social swim-->neurotypicals-->nerds/geeks-->Asperger's syndrome-->high-functioning autistics--> completely dysfunctional head-banging autistics
Human social connectedness depends on the ability of most people to read social signals. However, it is also clearly beneficial to human society to have some of its members partly stripped of that ability so that they can perceive reality logically without dealing with misleading conceptions deriving from pure social utility. That's where we get scientists and engineers from. (Charismatic politicians are at the other end of the spectrum.) The price we pay is that a few people will be doomed to spending their lives banging their heads on hard surfaces.
(Note: I'm not discounting possible environmental causes of autism here, just suggesting that if there are environmental causes, we are possibly looking at an overlay of environment-related cases sitting on top of a full spectrum of personality types within a normal range. Similarly, type I and type II diabetes are very different conditions despite the fact that they have problems with blood sugar control in common.)
I think that the male/female differences in continuum location comes about because it can be absolutely lethal for women to be unable to read social signals emanating from those who have been known to kill or maim them for such misreadings. Whether by biology or sex-role socialization or both, it is generally the case that girl geeks are usually somewhat less geeky than boy geeks--this enables them to mediate between boy geeks and society at large, even though they are generally unable to keep up with the junior high female "in" crowd.
Empathy continuum
Sociopaths-->near sociopaths-->soldiers/emergency workers-->the neurotypically empathic-->altruists-->hearts tending to bleed uncontrollably all over almost everything
Empathy is the human norm--we really do feel other peoples' pain. It creates social bonds because acting to relieve others' pain relieves our own psychological distress. However, it is also necessary to be able to suppress empathy for self-defense and for dealing with emergencies. Your chances of survival are greatly enhanced if your emergency room team does not feel your pain, but instead treats you like a malfunctioning meat machine until your vital signs are stabilized. If we need to suppress empathy occasionally to survive, it immediately follows that a few people will inevitably turn out to be entirely too good at it--hence sociopathology. To sociopaths, others are never anything but objects to be used for their own benefit. On the other end of the spectrum are people almost incapacitated for self defense because of their intense empathy--that's where religious traditions like Jainism come from.
Looking at phenomena like the high suicide rate among police officers and the incidence of PSTD in people exposed to battle conditions, we seem (thankfully) to not have enough people trending toward sociopathology to completely fill our needs for protection/emergency response career positions. PSTD exists because the majority of our cops and soldiers are neurotypically empathic.
So, what does all this have to do with conservatives?
Of the three continua I have described, I think that they are different from us on the empathy continuum. I'd label them as near-sociopathic, not Ted Bundy-style complete sociopaths, but having the same relationship to Ted Bundy as people with Asperger's syndrome have to head-banging autistics. The parts of their brains that process the information "How would I like it if someone did that to me?" function either poorly or only intermittently. And it's a common enough condition that I sure wish there was a common readily recognizable term analogous to Asperger's syndrome that we could use to describe them.
It explains at least a few things, like for instance how rule-bound and authoritarian they are. This indicates deviation from neurotypical empathic ability. Consider how Asperger's syndrome people deal with their inability to read social cues--they compensate by using rulebooks that they generate based on careful observation of neurotypical behavior. (#47. When a neurotypical says "How are you?" this is not actually a request for detailed information.)
Theologians, confronting the observation that people who did not share their particular religious beliefs nonetheless mostly behaved perfectly reasonably toward each other, came up with the concept of natural law. That is, inborn empathy is the foundation of human ethics and the source of the Golden Rule proverbs found in every known human culture. Lao Tzu famously observed "When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears." In other words, discard natural human empathy and immediately you need a lot rules and regulations to make people behave ethically.
So, perhaps the conservative insistence on punitive law enforcement, unthinking obedience to authority and displaying the Ten Commandments everywhere reflects real awareness of themselves as deficient people who can't function socially without a detailed rule book. Lots of sociopaths and near-sociopaths, after all, can pass for normal in society if they decide that following the rules is more convenient and pleasant for them than not following the rules. Naturally a near-sociopath will perceive neurotypically empathic types as "bleeding hearts," because that's how someone in the middle of the continuum looks to them from their position at the other end of it.
Situational sociopathology
Consider the well-known experiments of Stanley Milgram, which demonstrate clearly that just about anybody is capable of sociopathic behavior under the right conditions. This is analogous to situational depression, which results not from a genetic tendency to be in that place on the continuum or chemical imbalances in the brain, but from specific lousy things that happen to people.
Similarly, widespread situational sociopathology can result from truly threatening events, like the 9-11 attacks. The urge to strike back indiscriminately will eventually fade as we get back to normal, just as we eventually recover from the death of someone close, divorce, job loss and the like.
So, we have a core group of near-sociopaths that aren't going to change, and the rest of us who are capable of temporarily acting like them. If that first group isn't too large, we're in luck. All it takes to devalue the conservative memes is for more of us to be like the actors in Milgram's second set of experiments. A single voice saying "No, don't apply more intense shocks" snapped the rest of his experimental subjects out of their befuddled-by-authority stupor.
Any suggestions on realistically dealing with the minority of incurable non-empaths? Just let them have their Ten Commandment monuments? (It's certainly no favor to someone with Asperger's syndrome to advise them to just get along without their collections of rote recipes for social interaction and go by instinct and direct perception like other people do. That makes about as much sense as hollering "Make more insulin, dammit!" at diabetics.) Go along with a really punitive legal system to some extent? What?
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