Intellectual Empathy

Once, I saw outside my window a child whose shoelace was stuck in the crank of his bicycle.  It was raining and I left my apartment to help him extricate himself.  I act compassionately, and I care about fairness.  My therapist has suggested that this is a contradiction in my character, since I don't have strong emotions and usually don't form attachments to people.  After a therapy session, I was thinking about the contradiction that seems to arise from my apparent empathy.  I believe I have an explanation.  

As a child I had to decide how to interact with people.  I observed that people often treated me differently, and I observed that I felt there was something different about me.  I presumed there was a causal relationship of the latter to the former: that people treated me differently because I seemed different.  I wanted that to change, so I tried to figure people out.  I observed that people wanted things and that being given what they wanted made them happy.  And I was terrified of making people angry with me and of making a fool of myself in public.  So I was motivated to create optimal situations.

I used the scientific method.

Observation: I want to be safe and happy and I want to feel like I'm capable of getting what I need.

Hypothesis: Everyone else wants those things. 

Testing: I watched others and I interacted even though I didn't want to.  I didn't meet anyone who didn't want to be happy, safe, and effective.

Theory: if I make people feel one or more of those things, I will have made a good start on interacting successfully.

I felt like this gave me solid ground.  If I saw the world as a place in which equality was fluid, I became confused when interacting with people.  I couldn't navigate the social politics of a volatile equality landscape.  So I worked from the theory that everyone was my equal and used myself as a model for how others might be in general.  

I developed the idea that we have an obligation to help each other.  I wanted to be helped, so I reasoned that others did too.  When people got what they wanted, better situations arose a lot of the time.  And I wanted to make good situations.

I still operate this way.  What seems to be empathy from me is actually an intellectual way of engineering situations I can navigate and avoiding arguments or embarrassment.  I helped that kid on the sidewalk not because I cared whether he was happy or not - I don't actually know that he was - but because I felt it was my duty to help.  And I enjoy doing what I have decided I should do.  

But when I see someone treating someone else unfairly, I feel bad.  Why?

I do comprehend cause and effect, and I know that people react to each other.  I know that unfair treatment causes bad situations.  I can feel bad even about situations that I'm not in because I can imagine being in them.  I do have some empathy, but it's small.  I don't feel bad for others for very long.  An acquaintance called me a monster because I didn't weep for a fatal tragedy that occurred far away.  I didn't weep because it didn't affect me. I know that people who lost loved ones were sad and I am capable of assessing deadly situations intellectually as suboptimal for the creation of more happiness.  But my emotions just don't engage very often, and I don't contract emotion from others.   

I have experienced discrimination.  While I do know how unfair discrimination feels, it's mostly not because of emotion that I find it so terrible.  It's because discrimination creates unhappiness and because it makes that much less good the world I have to endure.  And it's also because it shows to me a state of the world in which equality is fluid. Observing injustice lay and experiencing injustice both lay before me a path through social interactions that I'm not capable of walking.  Unfairness poisons human relations, and that affects me as I attempt to relate with others.  

So my intellectual approach to interfacing with the world was, serendipitously, conducive to sets of behaviors and analyses that seem empathetic and thatfoster good and create situations I can deal with, so I plan to persist in that approach.