Writing

Jack Peterson is a self-described “loser.”

“I don’t think my looks are even above a four,” he says in an online video. “I believe these images below prove that I was not physically appealing,” he adds, referring to accompanying acne-pocked pics. Peterson, 20, is unemployed and still living with his mother.

Peterson’s monologue then meanders into describing a relationship he had as a young teenager with a woman he met online, someone five years older than him – who eventually dumped him.

“She said to me, ‘You have good hands but a bad penis. It’s just so small.’”

Later, in an interview with journalist Hannah Rosin, Peterson describes an in-person encounter with this then-girlfriend, the culmination of a series of meet-ups and arguments. Late one night, in a car in an empty parking lot, she tried to strangle him, Peterson said.

Rosin spoke with Peterson because she wanted to learn about incels, men who hate women because they won’t sleep with them, for a story for NPR’s Invisibilia podcast. These involuntary celibates often turn to online communities for support, as they spew toxic hatred for women and, at times, promote violence against them.

In fact, beginning infamously in 2014 with a shooting in Southern California that killed six people, the misogyny of incel chat rooms has spilled over into the public sphere. The next year in Roseburg, Oregon, an incel shot eight people at Umpqua Community College, before killing himself. In 2018, an incel in Tallahassee killed two women at a hot yoga studio.

Thing is, when Peterson vented on these incel forums about his heartbreak, he received abrasive responses and criticism, even verbal abuse, which he actually seemed to appreciate according to Rosin. “Abuse and abuse and more abuse, and he likes it,” she says on the Invisibilia episode featuring Peterson. “Incels hate empathy, sympathy, comfort of any kind - too feminine. So this was exactly what he needed. He felt seen.” Even still, Peterson would eventually renounce the incel community, in part because of the violence it inspired.

Rosin then shares that as she interviewed Peterson she began to feel sympathy for him. He was isolated and lonely, had been through a lot. But then, as she and her producer, Lina Misitzis, were cutting and splicing interview recordings into a narrative, Rosin realized she wasn’t fully comfortable with viewing Peterson’s story through a lens of empathy, the show’s usual angle. The producer/journalist team came to realize that there was more to the story than what Peterson shared or that he himself even perceived.

Peterson told Rosin he’d been incredibly jealous when his girlfriend spent time with other men, and Peterson talked about hounding her, calling “a million times” and threatening to hurt himself if she didn’t respond. Increasingly, she tried to avoid him, but Peterson persisted. Then one day, he hopped on a plane and showed up on her doorstep, uninvited, which led to the encounter in the car in an empty parking lot. And it turns out, Peterson admits, she was so afraid that night of what he might do that she made him strip down to his boxers to ensure he didn’t have a gun or knife on him. Later, after that tussle in the car and the breakup, Peterson sent nude photos of his now ex-girlfriend to her friends and colleagues.

Yet Peterson saw himself as the victim. So Rosin pulled up short, hit the brakes on her empathetic reactions to his story, really questioned what felt like a growing sense of sympathy for this guy who’d acted so abusively.

After recounting these events and Rosin’s reporting, Misitzis asks her, “Was your goal to get the listener into his head so they understand his circumstances and his arc?”

“That is always, unquestioningly, my goal,” Rosin responds. “And I honestly can say that for the first time, I am questioning that as a goal.”

Rosin asked herself: “Why? Where did I get this idea that my job is to get you to empathize with a guy like Jack Peterson?”

Echoing Rosin’s sentiments, the episode introduction asks: “Could we get you to understand where Jack came from - his version of what he saw and experienced and felt - maybe even be moved by him?”

But then they tack on a follow-up: “And should we?”

When telling personal stories, journalists (and humanitarians and politicians and preachers, among others) try to help readers and listeners understand other peoples’ lives and experiences, to empathize with them, because we generally view empathy-building or perspective-taking as not only an effective rhetorical device, but an inherent good. In fact, if only we could understand one another more, we say, if only we could feel what others feel, we say, then maybe we wouldn’t try to gouge each other’s eyes out and annihilate one another.

“Could we get you to understand where Jack came from - his version of what he saw and experienced and felt - maybe even be moved by him? And should we?”

“That was always the idea, that had the Germans had more empathy in the 1930s, Hitler would not have happened,” writes Fritz Breithaupt, scholar in German literature and cognitive science, whom the podcast references. “The genocide would not have happened. Empathy was kind of seen as the hope against all of these kinds of things.”

But what if as storytellers – or even in our daily, shared experiences – we’re mistaken in thinking empathy is always a useful goal? Do we need to feel sympathy for an incel like Peterson, who apparently abused his girlfriend but wasn’t self-aware enough to realize it? Do I need to empathize with people whose political or ethical views disgust me? Or whose actions have led to real-life suffering for other people? If a journalist helps us feel what a Nazi feels, who benefits? How much energy should I give toward understanding – much less caring for – someone who wants to do terrible harm to me or those I love?

Putting it another way, Rosin asks, “If I create a version of a story which overly identifies with and asks the listener to empathize with Jack Peterson, what are the possible consequences?”

Misitzis and Rosin determined that Peterson’s version didn’t account for his own culpability and everything his girlfriend went through, her own suffering. So Rosin found that she, herself, was basically doing more emotional and intellectual work – maybe more precise work – than Peterson, extending an interpretation of his story and psyche that Peterson wasn’t grasping, much less appreciating. She saw this gap between his self-perception (as a victim) and her perception of him (possible victim but likely perpetrator).

We probably all have people in our lives whom we see or interpret differently than they see themselves. For good or bad, we hold onto these interpretations pretty fiercely; we generally trust our own perceptions more than we trust others’ views on the world. Clinical research has proven this, and maybe this is as it should be: we survive this world only by listening to and following our own wits. In this sense, empathy might ultimately be more about us, our biases, and our own experiences than the actual character or actions of others.

When, to our perceptions, these other people in our lives lack self-awareness, they may try our patience. So what’s gained in spending empathetic energy on them? Sometimes, we do it to maintain a relationship or keep the peace. But what about people we detest? Why do the emotional work that some certain, unadmirable people aren’t, themselves, seemingly capable of?

“The Invisibilia way is the empathic way,” Rosin reiterates, “But Lina [Misitzis] - and really much of the world - seems to be losing patience with that way. In the post-#MeToo, vigilant, polarized Trump-era world, showing empathy for your so-called enemies is practically taboo.”

Furthermore, we’re each limited in how much empathy we’re capable of feeling. Our affective support or care for others extends only so far, to a limited number of people, and mostly to those within relational circles closest to us. So why spend my empathetic energies on people whom I don’t wish to know well and care for? Doing more empathetic work than these people begins to have co-dependent relationship vibes: Peterson was treated poorly, was maybe even abused! So much so that he doesn’t even understand himself! But I understand for him!

Misitzis and Rosin assert that when you begin to empathize with someone, you actually lose motivation to counter their views – in a sense enabling their (potentially bad) behavior.

Rosin reflects on the point: “Empathy is not an infinite resource. And it’s not free because it saps your strength for the fight. So if you boost one side, you’ll make the other side weaker. And that is especially a problem when the side you’re boosting is the side with power.”

Misitzis recounts the experience of listening to a profile of a white supremacist, which in fact helped her empathize with him. “I feel like, in that moment,” she says, “I lost a little bit of my conviction. In that moment, I was hearing this person being given the room to allow us into his brain […] And it was f***ing with my conviction in a way that I’m almost ashamed of.”

“Because if you do lose your conviction,” Rosin responds, “you might not have the energy to march in the streets or get better laws to protect women from dangerous exes. So the new rule is reserve it – not for your ‘enemies’ but for the people you believe are hurt or you have decided need it the most – for the victims, for your own damn team. That’s how you make things better.”

Like Rosin and Misitzis, more and more people are in fact pushing back against this notion that in order to build a better society we need to do the hard work of empathizing with one another. And empathy, they claim, doesn’t just weaken our fight against our enemies – empathy actually creates enemies: Hitler rose to power exactly because of empathy, an excess of empathy for one’s own that enables tribalizing and, in turn, viewing the “other” as unrelatable, unrelated, and less valued. This tribalizing causes us to demonize and separate ourselves from people unlike us. Breithaupt continues, “Some terrorists, I would say it’s not a complete absence of empathy that draws them in, but rather it’s an excess of empathy. They feel the pity. They feel the suffering of their people.”

Empathy may well be a net negative. “The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to a lack of empathy,” says Paul Bloom, professor emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. “Actually, they are often due to too much of it.” Bloom points out that our empathetic partiality toward those most like us leads to biased decision-making, nepotism, and misplaced compassion.

Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne sees expressions of empathy particularly problematic when their target is powerful men – especially hetero white men, and especially related to sex, prominent concerns for incels. Writing for the New York Times, Manne notes that powerful men accused of sexual abuse often “enjoy” undue support from other people – and not only other men. She famously called this himpathy: “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.”

Manne points to public sympathies for Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court hearings, when he and his family were, in some peoples’ view, made to “endure” sexual assault accusations by Christine Blasey Ford – without much concern for her apparent suffering. Or consider the sympathy people felt for Brock Turner, a former swimmer at Stanford University, who raped a woman while she lay unconscious. Once an aspiring Olympiad, Turner even received sympathy from the judge on his case who worried over “the severe impact” a conviction would have on Turner’s future. Himpathy causes people to minimize or even dismiss such bad behavior by men.

Whether you’re feeling bad for an incel like Peterson, who may well be victim to his own low self-esteem, or sympathizing with men in power who may well, somehow, be victims themselves (existing as men in a misogynistic society? I’m still no sure how to square this one), or if you just feel empathy for those you know, at the exclusion of others … empathy does start to feel like an increasingly tangled and troubled concept. I do think it’s a good thing we’re reexamining empathy; if the goal is to create a kinder, more egalitarian society, empathy, as we’ve come to know and employ it, may well be losing its usefulness.

Even so, I’d like to challenge Rosin’s and Misitzis’s doubts about the value of feeling empathy for incels (and other people we don’t like), as well as tweak the empathetic lens through which we view Manne’s himpathy.

Note Manne’s use of the word sympathy when defining himpathy as “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy” that people have for men who act egregiously. This “sympathy” is a feeling of pity for someone else’s misfortune. “Empathy,” on the other hand, is generally understood as just sharing in someone else’s feelings. Pity isn’t necessarily involved; you’re simply comprehending emotions. Sympathy and empathy are not, in fact, synonymous and interchangeable (though in practice people do use them interchangeably, all the time).

What’s more, we can make an additional distinction between affective empathy (literally feeling what others feel) and cognitive empathy (understanding the facts of someone’s circumstances). And if we move the discussion into the realm of cognitive empathy – an intellectual or, arguably, more objective view on others’ experiences – we’re simply taking in information. This cognitive empathy doesn’t carry the same cost for the individual as emotional empathy; it has much deeper reserves than affective empathy, maybe only limited by our usual intellectual or neurological limits.

If himpathy is understood more in the ilk of sympathy – feeling sorry for incels or powerful white men – then, sure, you might feel pity and in turn become less motivated to call out egregious acts. You may find yourself feeling more forgiveness for abusers and less concern for their victims. And it does seem arguable that, yes, we can each tap out on how much we extend our feelings for others’ suffering. “Compassion fatigue” is a real hazard, especially in helping professions and humanitarian work, for example. But I can empathize without feeling someone else’s feelings, much less sympathizing. I don’t have to foster feelings of pity toward incels, even as I seek to understand why they act as they do. This, in fact, is a critical facet of the fact-gathering work that Rosin and Misitzis have done so effectively through their reporting and research.

I’d argue that we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t empathize, at least cognitively, with our enemies. Isn’t it critical that we have an intellectual understanding of what goes into creating white supremacists? We don’t need to feel pity for perpetrators of sexual assault, but anyone involved in prevention and related justice efforts is going to benefit from grasping – on an intellectual level – how such perpetrators think and feel. How else do we stop misogynistic behavior in incel chat rooms from turning into real-world killing sprees? In fact, cognitive empathy can motivate us to march in the streets and create better laws.

Finally, I think it’s still worth doing low-investment emotional empathy work for people we loathe. We can calibrate the scope and depth of our emotional responses, leverage affective empathy with nuance according to our circumstances and needs; we can avoid “compassion fatigue” if we know our limits. Doing this emotional work – of both feeling empathy and managing our boundaries – benefits ourselves and others.

In Peterson’s case, we can see what happened when people extended affective empathy to him, without much personal cost to themselves.

By 2021, Peterson, known widely for his role in incel chatrooms, was speaking with members of the press, this after an incel drove his van through a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10. What Peterson found surprising, he told Rosin, was how nicely interviewers – many of them women – treated him. This was an entirely new empathic experience for him. “So that exposure to kindness of people in these positions of power and status,” he said, “made me feel like maybe the game isn’t rigged in the way I thought it was.”

While these journalists may have just been doing their jobs, as Misitzis notes, their actions made Peterson feel seen, understood. They listened to his stories. They spent time with him. Their gestures expressed, to a certain extent, that they accepted him. Likely, some would have felt the same ambiguity or even disgust that Misitzis and Rosin felt toward Peterson, but these journalists also calibrated their empathic actions to fit circumstances. As a result, accommodating kindnesses changed Peterson. He started to feel confidence and a sense of possibility: “Maybe if I – you know, if there’s s*** that I want to do, it’s – maybe it’s not impossible. Maybe all it really takes is just to work hard and just be a nice person like all of these people are.”

Like all of these people are… Empathy opened Peterson up to empathy.

Through cognitive empathy, you can understand those you find abhorrent. And you can extend some modicum of emotional or affective empathy without having to care for people, per se. And you can do this, in fact, for your own good and for our collective good.

If we choose to withhold empathy – incredibly tempting in today’s divisive social climate – we risk losing our ability to understand others on even basic levels, which helps none of us. When we act (or, more to the point here, think and feel) in wholly partisan ways, and we stop extending even cognitive empathy (much less any emotional empathy or sympathy) we lose our sense of others’ humanity — and maybe even a bit of our own.

We also make a practical, strategic mistake: a lack of empathy will, in the end, prevent us from getting what we most want.

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Listen to the entire Invisibilia podcast featured in this post, “The End of Empathy.”