the end of weaponized empathy

stop buttering up the buttercups

step one: how does this image make you feel?

remember your answer. there will be a test.

narrator: action was not coming.

this movie seems to be on auto repeat all over social media right now. it’s astonishing the breakdowns and breakage that seem to have been triggered by two weeks of “the donald.”

leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of all this opinion and histrionic hurdy-burly, i find the overall pathology fascinating.

i also think it likely means something very different than most are inclined to assume.

why is becky from vassar not only having this meltdown, but forensically documenting it in full living color online for all the world to see? this seems an odd response to “hurt.”

so what drives this?

my sense is that this is not just “i’m upset” it’s performance art as manipulation. sure, some of it is tribal virtue and issue signaling, but mostly it looks to me to be a sort of bat signal to guilt trip people into helping the more machiavellian of the theater kids.

it’s a natural human impulse to want to help those that look scared or hurt. it’s part of the goodness of many humans.

but it’s also a weakness that can be preyed upon, used to advantage.

and i think we’re seeing a lot of that.

the ability to manipulate others while claiming virtue and status for so doing attracts cluster B traits like rotting fruit attracts wasps.

this performative fragility has weaponized empathy and for a time, this has proven a very effective tactic of passive aggressive emotional grifting.

the issue is that past a certain point, people simply stop caring about you and your endless needy demands for the world to order itself around your right not to be offended as the cornerstone and non-negotiable demand of your sense of well being and security.

it becomes too tiresome and intrusive to support and too obvious a ploy to keep working. you lose your ability to suck in the rubes because the demands grow ever more baroque and the aggressions needed to elicit them grow ever more micro.

but “my emotions are your fault, fix it!” is not really much of an axis-mundi for one’s character, is it?

eventually, it slips over into just being grating and the response rates to this crybully campaign drop.

this results in upped intensity to try to get the attention and authority back and this rapidly results in a feedback loop of accusing any who will not accommodate you of being somehow “cruel” and suddenly “just wanting to be left alone” gets cast as malicious.

this can only be taken so far.

when the very people accusing you of "lacking concern" are actually playing upon your concern and using it to manipulate you, you eventually wise up.

it snaps into focus that this was never a damsel in distress, it was a long con.

at its most charitable, this was just bad pavlovian conditioning induced by getting a cookie every time you throw a tantrum, but a lot of it is done with malice aforethought.

now go back and look at the image from the beginning of the piece.

now how does it make you feel?

it's amazing how broken and and repulsive this looks once you stop feeling a need to protect it.

there is going to be a lot of "crying alone" as this trick ceases to function.

“just because you want it to be a thing does not mean it’s a thing”

i don't mean to be mean. our tear bedecked gate grizzler may well be in acute distress, but pretending like it's all somehow our problem to fix instead of hers when she is the one lacking basic human resiliency of a level at which 5 year olds have been historically expected to perform does not help anyone, least of all our airport anxious annies.

that’s her being mean to the rest of us and trying to make her problems our problems. do you suspect she had any sympathy for others who disliked “boybands for harris” hats? i’m guessing she’d have railed at them and defended the wearer. and that’s the key pivot, isn’t it?

it’s one big game of “punch, no punchbacks, empathy for me but not for thee.”

that is not empathy, it’s tactical morality applied through the performance of aggrievement. but “justification by sad” is no basis for an ethical system.

what has changed is that the vast abilene paradox of everyone thinking this was mostly absurd but no one speaking up or doing anything about it has broken.

it feels like a shift in sentiment, but it’s not. it’s the popping of a preference falsification bubble in which sentiment was widely misreported and faked in order to conform to incorrect perceptions of what was popular.

when it pops, it all goes at once and suddenly everyone is looking around saying “wait a minute, none of you liked this either?” and realizing that the minority they thought themselves to constitute had long been a majority. this is the power of censorship and saturation propaganda: you can mistake a minority for a majority or an extortionist for an ethicist. the public lacks any accurate view into its own collective mind.

the dam the brothers and sisters of perpetual offendedness are feeling break is one of opinion and social taboo. we were all told we had to care about this, hectored into stopping the ride every time any kid cried, told that that was normal, required, morally obligatory.

team aggrievement are now struggling with the sound of silence in response to the previously “magic words” of their professions of perturbation.

they are not ready to hear this.

but they need to.

at a certain point, buttercups need to toughen up and more sympathy for their self-cultivated frailty and emotional incapacity is not a path to self-governance or self-confidence, it’s just more cookies for crybullies.

and it’s OK to say so.

it’s OK to say no.

it’s OK to stop falling for this and it’s not on you to make it right.

it’s the empathetic here who have been taking years of abuse heaped upon them by the narcissistic.

the irony is thick enough to stand a spoon in: the very trait you were accused of lacking was used to manipulate you into kowtowing to the people who lacked it and who would certainly have never returned such a favor if asked.

this ends when we stop believing that the self-inculcated fragility of others is somehow on us to fix because they have raised it to the level of passive aggressive performance art.

never was.