Tag: Empathy

Is narcissism fueling racism?

Is our racism fueled by narcissism? This is a time where we need to educate ourselves, strive to understand, use empathy to grasp what living in someone else’s skin means.

I’m throwing the question there, like bait, wishing someone will help me answer it. The question would not have much transcendence if it were not because many of the ills of humanity in the present are due to this plague, characterized by the incapacity to feel the pain of others.

BLM Vigil
Credits: https://blacklivesmatter.com/now-we-transform/

If narcissists lack something, it is empathy. They cannot connect with the feelings of others; they cannot grasp other people’s inner world. In the United States, it is essential to become “the” Number One, defeat a rival, earn more, be more productive, be famous, and the consequence is that more than anywhere else, but not exclusively, narcissism is becoming widespread. Narcissism and individualism are close cousins. The fact that the Times magazine called the Millenials the “Me me me” generation is not an accident. Neoliberalism feeds this trend. A neoliberal logic calls for a growing personal responsibility and discounts the solidary responsibilities of the state or the significance of social justice issues

It is reflected in the way we educate children, the way parents raise them, the undeserved praise we provide them? Is it a matter of intellectual rigidity where we cannot see beyond our limited experience and what we believe (or were told) is true?

As I see protesters all around the United States (and the world) marching in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, as I see workers protesting and demanding fair wages, I also see the faces of hundreds of people who have no clue about what these protests are about. People who cannot understand what being a black person or living on less than a minimum wage means.

Racism is such that the actual color of the skin, the social status, the level of education doesn’t really matter if you’re not one of them. I have been called a “coloured” person because I come from a South American country (even if my skin color is rather milky white) and the medical degree I earned there, a white male Republican illustrated to me, is not as good and respectable as if I had earned it in this country!

I had to educate myself to understand that I can’t–and probably will never be able to–fully grasp what the experience of a “coloured person” is in this country.

I can say, though, that it requires empathy to step out of our comfortable places and get into someone else’s shoes. Narcissism is thinking we are better, we know better, and others should just be just like us.

I have often heard that if someone does not have a better life, they have not tried hard enough. Those who adhere to this theory are probably oblivious to the history of white supremacy, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, supremacy, and privilege. Will learning about the suffering black people endured while working to build the wealth of others allow us to be more empathetic? If not, what would?

Conscious evolution from fear to solidarity

How do we responde to stress or fear? We have choices but we need to learn how to regulate emotions and become more compassionate.

Dr. Silvia Casabianca argues that humans are hardwired for empathy, love and compassion. These gifts reside in our genes, our physiology, our chemistry, and they can be nurtured and developed. They can be harnessed and used to solve many of the problems we struggle with-from the interpersonal to the geopolitical. Millennia of human experience have led us to this moment when we are perhaps finally ready to embrace, and enact our true, loving nature. The coronavirus pandemic provides us with an opportunity to rethink the way we live, to appreciate what we have instead of craving for what we don’t have. This might be an opportunity to become more aware of how crucial relationships are and that we’re so interconnected that what I do, can affect everybody else. Go to www.SilviaCasabianca.com or buy her book in Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/ydy6eljm

We’re wired for love but humans have created stratified societies that enhance competition over cooperation and having over just being.   The coronavirus pandemic provides us with an opportunity to rethink the way we live, to appreciate what we have instead of craving for what we don’t have. This might be an opportunity to become more aware of how crucial relationships are and that we’re so interconnected that what I do, can affect everybody else.  
We often fail to embrace our common humanity or commit to our common destiny with full responsibility.   It often takes a crisis, an epidemic, a recession, an earthquake, a hurricane, to activate what Shelly Taylor called our tend-and-befriend response.   But if we learn new parenting and education modalities that take into account our human potential for empathy, compassion and solidarity, we will become equipped to solve the most pressing problems humanity and our planet face.

Our foremost asset is that we’re born hardwired for empathy, compassion, and love even if the current state of affairs in the world often seems to contradict this assertion.  

Many of our problems come from the way we learn to respond to fear or perceived threats in the environment without consciously assessing them first. In other words, we have not learned to regulate emotions, we respond automatically. This is mostly because our educational and parenting models are centered on modifying children’s behavior instead of promoting autonomy, self-compassion, and empathy.