The War on Empathy: Why Authoritarians Fear It
Welcome to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about empathy. Not the vague feel good notion tossed around in HR manuals or Instagram quotes, but the actual psychological phenomenon. Empathy is what allows us to connect with one another, to care, to protect, to organize, and to survive.
Leslie Poston:It's the foundation of moral reasoning and human cooperation, and it's under attack. Right now, empathy is being reframed as a weakness by authoritarian figures, by theocratic extremists, and by media pundits whose entire business model is to stir resentment. Some of them go as far as to call empathy a sin, which is ironic, coming from people who claim to worship a man who literally said, love your neighbor as yourself. The assault on empathy isn't just moral hypocrisy. It's strategic.
Leslie Poston:Empathy threatens authoritarian control because it humanizes the people those systems need you to hate. So let's get into the psychology of what empathy really is, how it works, why it's so important, and how it's being systematically dismantled. We use the word empathy all the time, but it's often misunderstood. In psychology, empathy isn't just feeling bad for someone that's sympathy. Empathy is more complex.
Leslie Poston:There are actually three types. First, there's cognitive empathy, the ability to understand another person's perspective, what they might be thinking or feeling. It doesn't mean you agree with them, it just means you can see where they're coming from. Then there's emotional empathy, where you actually feel the emotions that someone else is experiencing. You wince when they stub their toe.
Leslie Poston:You get choked up when they share a story of grief. Finally, there is compassionate empathy or empathetic concern. That's when your understanding and emotional resonance lead you to act, to help, to comfort or support. In the brain, empathy involves a network of systems. The mirror neuron system helps us simulate others' experiences.
Leslie Poston:The medial prefrontal cortex helps us think about other minds, and the insula and anterior cingulate cortex play roles in the emotional side of it. These aren't just poetic metaphors. Empathy is a real measurable function of human cognition and emotion. What's important to know is that empathy isn't some passive, squishy ideal. It's not weakness.
Leslie Poston:It's a core human survival skill that we are biologically wired to possess and culturally trained to suppress or express, depending on what benefits people empower. Empathy doesn't magically appear in adulthood. It begins in infancy. Babies will cry when they hear other babies cry. This is an early primitive form of affective resonance.
Leslie Poston:As children develop, so does their capacity to recognize others' emotions, take different perspectives, and eventually act on that awareness in moral ways. This development doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's shaped by babies' caregivers, their culture, media, the schools they go to, and their social interactions. Kids raised in emotionally responsive environments learn to regulate their own feelings and recognize others' needs. Kids raised in emotionally repressive or punitive environments learn to numb themselves and often project that numbness outward as cruelty.
Leslie Poston:Empathy also plays a fundamental role in how societies function. It's what allows for reciprocity, cooperation, mutual aid, and trust. You can't have a working society without some baseline ability to imagine other people's experiences. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, empathy gave us a huge survival advantage. It let early humans cooperate, share resources, care for the sick, and protect the vulnerable.
Leslie Poston:Empathy isn't some New Age luxury. It's why we've made it this far as a species. And yet, because it's so essential, it's also incredibly vulnerable to manipulation. Empathy doesn't thrive in systems designed to dominate. Research into right wing authoritarianism shows a consistent pattern.
Leslie Poston:Those who score high on authoritarian traits tend to score lower on measures of empathy. And that's not a coincidence. It's because authoritarian systems depend on clear ingroups and outgroups. They rely on obedience, not understanding, on loyalty and not compassion. If you can empathize with the other, quote, the scapegoat, the enemy, then the whole system breaks down.
Leslie Poston:You're not supposed to see asylum seekers as people fleeing violence. You're supposed to see them as invaders. You're not supposed to see trans kids as children seeking safety. You're supposed to see them as threats. This dehumanization is required for authoritarian cruelty to be acceptable.
Leslie Poston:That's why authoritarian messaging often frames empathy as dangerous. It warns against being too soft, too emotional, too influenced by feelings. This is strategic. It trains people to view human connection as a threat to order. It also creates an environment where cruelty becomes normalized and even celebrated.
Leslie Poston:Think about the cheers at rallies when someone is mocked for being poor, disabled, or marginalized. That's not political strategy it's mass emotional conditioning. What's especially insidious about this conditioning is how it exploits the cognitive biases we all share. When we're afraid, our empathy naturally narrows. Our brains prioritize survival over understanding.
Leslie Poston:Authoritarians know this and deliberately stoke fear to shut down empathetic response. They create an artificial state of emergency where there's no room for nuance or compassion. The strategic erosion of empathy also manifests in language manipulation. Notice how certain terms get weaponized. Woke becomes a slur against compassion.
Leslie Poston:Politically correct transforms consideration into weakness. Snowflake mocks emotional sensitivity. This linguistic framing is calculated to make empathy seem not just unnecessary but actively harmful to social order. When language itself becomes hostile to emotional connection, people begin to self censor their natural empathetic responses to avoid social punishment. We talked more about this last week, so go listen to that episode if you'd like more detail.
Leslie Poston:This process is further reinforced by what psychologists like to call cognitive closure. That's the desire for clear, simple answers in a complex world. Empathy is messy. It requires sitting with ambiguity, having multiple perspectives, and understanding and accepting emotional discomfort. Authoritarian ideology offers the opposite.
Leslie Poston:Absolute certainty, black and white thinking, clear villains and heroes. For people overwhelmed by complexity, this certainty feels like relief, even if it requires shutting down their natural empathetic responses, a core part of their humanity. Nowhere is this emotional conditioning more grotesque than in the weaponization of religions and spirituality. Christian nationalism, in particular, has hijacked the language of moral virtue to justify acts of extreme cruelty. Their same Jesus, who said, Blessed are the merciful, is now invoked to support policies that punish the poor, ban refugees, and criminalize compassion.
Leslie Poston:This isn't accidental. It's a psychological maneuver. It shifts the moral foundation from care and harm to loyalty, authority, and purity. Jonathan Haidt's research into moral foundations theory helps explain this. For some people, moral decisions aren't rooted in empathy, but in hierarchy and obedience.
Leslie Poston:We have an episode on that as well, so just look for vertical versus horizontal morality a few weeks back. Those hierarchical systems are fertile ground for people that want to replace kindness with control. In this framework, empathy is framed not only as weakness, but as sin. Helping the wrong person becomes a betrayal. Loving the wrong neighbor becomes an act of rebellion against divine order.
Leslie Poston:And so cruelty becomes a kind of religious performance, a way to prove belonging to the in group through exclusion and harm to the out group. And that's not Christianity. That's Christovascism. And it's devastating people's ability to care. The theological distortion required for this shift is profound.
Leslie Poston:If you are Christian I am not but if you are the Jesus of the Gospels repeatedly violated social boundaries to show compassion, touching lepers, speaking to Samaritans, defending women accused of sexual impropriety. He explicitly challenged rigid interpretations of religious law that harmed vulnerable people. Yet contemporary Christian nationalism presents a version of this faith where protecting boundaries matters more than crossing them to show kindness. What makes this notably effective as a psychological weapon is how it creates a moral cover for dehumanization. If you can frame cruelty as divine justice, you can bypass normal empathetic restraints.
Leslie Poston:You can sleep at night while supporting policies that cage children or deny health care to the poor because you convinced yourself that your cruelty is actually a form of tough love, or worse, God's will. This isn't just theological error. It's emotional manipulation on a massive scale. As empathy is devalued, something else takes its place, spite. Spite is one of the most dangerous social emotions.
Leslie Poston:It's not just indifference to other suffering, it's the desire to make others suffer even if it hurts you too. You can see this in the rise of quote own the libs politics where the goal isn't to solve problems, but to humiliate others. And conversely, you can see it in the FAFO politics that we're seeing from Democrats to the MAGA Republicans right now. It works both ways. You see it in policies that make life harder for marginalized groups, even when they don't materially benefit the people pushing for them.
Leslie Poston:Denying health care, banning books, restricting rights, These things don't help most people, but they do scratch an emotional itch, punishing people who are different. Spite flourishes when people feel powerless. It gives them a twisted sense of agency. They think if I can't be safe or prosperous, at least I can make sure someone else suffers. That mindset spreads like a virus, and it's fatal to a democracy because a democracy depends on shared humanity.
Leslie Poston:We're seeing a cultural shift from asking what do others need to how can I make others pay? And that's not just sad. It's unsustainable. The psychology of spite has been studied extensively, and what's interesting is how easily it can be triggered. In economic games, people will often accept personal losses just to ensure others lose more.
Leslie Poston:This isn't rational from a self interest perspective. It's emotionally driven, and is becoming a dominant force in our politics. What makes spite exceptionally dangerous is that it's self reinforcing. Once spite becomes a cultural norm, it creates reciprocal hostility. Those targeted respond defensively, which confirms the initial negative beliefs.
Leslie Poston:This makes a feedback loop of mutual antagonism that's incredibly difficult to break. Each side feels increasingly justified in their contempt. The media ecosystem worsens this dynamic by rewarding performative cruelty with attention and social currency. Online platforms amplify the most emotionally provocative content, creating incentives for ever more extreme displays of dehumanization. What begins as political disagreement morphs into existential hatred, and at that point, democracy itself becomes impossible because you can't share power with people you no longer see as fully human.
Leslie Poston:Psychologists have identified a phenomenon called social dominance orientation, a personality trait measuring one's preference for hierarchy and dominance in social systems. People high in this trait are more likely to engage in spite driven behaviors, especially when they perceive threats to existing power structures. They're not just indifferent to suffering, they actively support policies created if those policies maintain hierarchies they value. This explains why some voters consistently support policies against their economic self interest. They're not confused about what benefits them financially.
Leslie Poston:They're prioritizing status protection over material gain. The emotional satisfaction of maintaining hierarchy outweighs the practical benefits of cooperation for them. This is a dangerous tradeoff that authoritarian movements exploit masterfully. The good news is that empathy isn't fixed. It can be cultivated and rebuilt.
Leslie Poston:Programs like Roots of Empathy, for example, used in schools around the world, show us that even young children can develop stronger empathetic skills when they're given the tools and emotional models. Restorative justice circles in schools and in courts have also shown powerful results in creating emotional understanding across conflict lines. Narrative is another powerful tool. Neuroscientist Paul Zak's work shows us that stories, especially those with emotional arcs, stimulate oxytocin production and help people connect with others' experiences. When we consume stories with depth and vulnerability, we feel more connected to the people in them and, by extension, the people in our own lives.
Leslie Poston:Importantly, empathy can be modeled in everyday life. When we refuse to dehumanize others in conversation, when we interrupt cruelty instead of letting it slide, when we listen without needing to fix or to dominate, we're building social empathy circuits in the people around us. And neuroscience confirms these circuits are plastic. They can atrophy, but they can also regenerate. What's fascinating about empathy from a neuroscience perspective is that it operates on multiple levels simultaneously.
Leslie Poston:At the most basic level, where mirror neurons fire when we observe others, creates a simulation of their experience in our own minds. But higher level perspective taking requires executive function, the ability to mentally step outside ourselves and imagine another's reality. So this means empathy involves both automatic unconscious processes and conscious deliberate ones. This dual nature is actually great news for empathy restoration. Even when unconscious empathetic responses have been suppressed through cultural conditioning, we can consciously practice perspective taking.
Leslie Poston:With time, this practice rebuilds the neural pathways that make empathy feel natural again. It's similar to physical therapy after an injury. With consistent exercise, function returns. Research on prejudice reduction supports this. Meaningful contact between groups, collaborative projects with shared goals, and perspective taking exercises all show measurable effects in reducing dehumanization.
Leslie Poston:Even brief interventions can create significant shifts. For example, studies where people were asked to write about the world from another person's perspective showed immediate increases in empathetic concern and reductions in stereotyping. This suggests that while the assault on empathy is real and dangerous, it's not irreversible. Empathy can be deliberately cultivated through both individual practice and institutional design. Schools that incorporate social emotional learning show measurable improvements in students' empathetic abilities.
Leslie Poston:Workplaces that reward collaborative problem solving rather than cutthroat competition show higher levels of prosocial behavior. Media that represents complex humanizing portrayals across political and cultural lines can expand our circle of moral concern. So how do we protect empathy in a world that's trying to erase it? We start small. We build microcultures of care in our families, our friend groups, our workplaces, our classrooms.
Leslie Poston:Basically, we build community. We choose connection over contempt. We tell stories that reveal the full humanity of others. We resist cruelty, not only politically but emotionally. Empathy does not mean we agree with everyone or that we excuse harm.
Leslie Poston:It means we recognize the humanity in others, even when it's inconvenient. It means we're willing to be vulnerable, even when that's unfashionable. And it means we protect each other, not because we have to, but because we choose to. Empathy is not passive, it's protective. Empathy is resistance.
Leslie Poston:And right now, it might be one of the most radical things that you can practice. In practical terms, this means creating what we call brave spaces, environments where difficult conversations can happen with both honesty and care. It means practicing moral courage, having the willingness to speak up when others are dehumanized even at personal cost. It means intentionally exposing ourselves to perspectives and experiences beyond our comfort zones, not to change our core values, but to expand our understanding. On a larger scale, it means supporting systems and policies that structurally enable empathy rather than sabotage it.
Leslie Poston:Universal healthcare, for example, is not just about medical access. It's about creating a society where we acknowledge our shared vulnerability and collective responsibility for each other's well-being. Education that emphasizes critical thinking and cultural understanding isn't woke indoctrination. It's preparation for citizenship in a complex, diverse democracy. Media literacy isn't just about spotting fake news.
Leslie Poston:It's about recognizing emotional manipulation that targets our fear in our tribal instincts. History offers us powerful example. During World War II, citizens in Nazi occupied Denmark wore yellow stars in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. During the AIDS crisis, straight allies joined ACCA to demand medical research and humane treatment. During Jim Crow, white students joined Freedom Rides despite violent reprisals.
Leslie Poston:And there was even a White Panthers created to support and amplify what the Black Panthers were doing that's not really well talked about. And these weren't just political acts. They were empathetic ones. They represented the refusal to accept the dehumanization of others even when it would have been easier and safer to comply. Today, we face similar choices.
Leslie Poston:Do we laugh at cruelty or interrupt it? Do we consume media that deepens our understanding or that inflames our hatred? Do we practice curiosity or condemnation when we're faced with something that's different? These aren't abstract, philosophical questions. They are daily decisions that we need to make that shape our neural pathways and our social fabric.
Leslie Poston:And of course, empathy alone isn't enough. We need justice, accountability, and systemic change. But empathy is the psychological foundation that makes those larger transformations possible. And without it, even the best systems fail because they'll be implemented by people who are unable to recognize each other's humanity. Perhaps most importantly, practicing empathy in a hostile environment requires community.
Leslie Poston:None of us can maintain empathetic connection in isolation. We need spaces where our own humanity is recognized and affirmed so that we can extend that recognition to others. Finding or creating those spaces might be the single most important act of resistance against authoritarian emotional control we could make. And this isn't about political partisanship. It's about protecting the psychological foundation of democratic society itself.
Leslie Poston:Without empathy, there's no common good, no social contract, and no sustainable future. With empathy, we have a chance, not just to survive our current crisis, but to build something better on the other side. Thanks again for listening to PsyberSpace. This is your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. And just leaving you with a request that you all become more active in rehumanizing the people around you.
Leslie Poston:As always, until next time, stay curious and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
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