A special type of neuron that fires whenever the owner of the brain that holds these neurons does an action that another brain-owning-agent has performed, is a neuron called a mirror neuron. It stands to reason that these neurons hold one of many keys to understanding the mystery of empathy, a state of being where one’s own self is molded by an environment which the agent finds itself in.
A person with reduced or redacted empathy, is a person that has limited ability to be molded by an agential environment around them, making them people who cannot deal with the unknown depths of other minds. It leads them to finding comfort in themselves, in their own skin, their own work, their own way of doing things, without having the ability to attain an understanding about the consequences of their decisions within other people.
Despite what we may believe, the brain is primarily an information processing machine, that takes inputs from millions of cells around the body, to formulate actions based on these inputs, and “magically” suggests and forces the appendages and other muscles attached to it to act in ways that come natural to us.
Given the size of the central nervous system, it is clear that there is a limit to its capability, which means that there is a limit to how much information it can process in any given minute. It stands to reason then, that there are clear, hard limits on how much useful output a single human being can produce, in time, in space, in practice. Enhancement drugs and other tips for healthy minds can push the brain to fire more and create new pathways, but the broken brain cannot build things it was never meant to do, such as correctly reproducing the feeling of another person, even just for a split second.
And why should they? In agent-agnostic practices, the full spectrum of human emotions is a hindrance to one’s success in the field. Cooks cook, but do not paint. Mountain guides guide, but do not compute. Architects architect, but do not build. Every practice restricts its practitioner to exercise a particular state of information processing, forcing the other faculties to suffer in regard to their performance, that only with great difficulty can be won back. For this reason, all professionals sacrifice parts of their brains in proportion to the time they make them spend on work, to live their lives without mental strain, to focus on whatever it is they deem important. Children. Hobbies. More work.
Men tend to center their lives around economic output, given the patriarchal nature of social expectations. It is not surprising that men should be the ones who suffer great reductions in empathy over time, especially if they were to rise the ranks of hierarchical structures, where they matter less and less, where fewer things matter, where they speak words and say sentences of a predefined origin, which come from speaking with adults when they were kids: Respectful words, naive attitudes and cowardice to appear weak. Such paths have been set for men their whole lives, whose breaking away from these traditional values can cost them dearly in the form of stigmatization and exclusion from spaces reserved for them.
Indeed, the workplace has historically been a male space, which in one formulation might be expressed that this space is being “invaded” by women, despite the fact that no such agenda has ever been explicitly stated or elaborated on in detail. Men don’t often think about what spaces should designate their own, and which ones belong to the other, because like most things in our lives, we inherit past things: sentiments, traditions, languages, spaces. There are no reasons for us to believe the things we do, other than the horror of existential discomfort we might feel, when things are not the way we feel they are supposed to be. We are, in effect, governed by the horrid past of diseases, war and narcissistic desires for power over nature and over our own mothers and our sisters, our fathers, and our brothers and also our children. Anyone below us in the hierarchy of society or the family, is a victim of our own making, even while we ourselves are victims of higher powers, be they God, our principles, our leaders or our direct superiors. Given that the past rose from the dust through violent conquest into a shape and form that it cannot otherwise be molded into, it is not reasonable to believe it should be the entity to guide us to a just future. Our present is, in effect, a world unseen, unfelt by the dead, but governed by it nonetheless.
Yet, shaping fresh ideas out of thin air is always met with militant resistance from those who use the foundations of the past, to inform themselves about the future, as they neurologically cannot process recent but wide-ranging information: they have sacrificed the social future early on for their psychological survival. People that cannot adapt are not quite zombies in the sense that they’re brainless, although if the timing of the day is right, and context plays in your favor, the sun can shine into their eye in just the right angle for those attentive enough to see, that many men and women harbor dead parts that they drag along, hoping that they will be sufficient to bring about the good.
If the future that they want is that past that has held them high and given them riches, then there is a self-centered bias in their thinking, a common mishap of human nature that won’t allow for new ideas to be explored. While men might benefit from such ignorance more frequently, there are processes at work that do not care for one’s own beliefs and views, and will be indifferent to one’s struggles. Additionally, women might charge against men’s atavistic views of what it is men must do, and women too would be in their right to do so, even if they too are strongly biased to care for the livelihood of their own minds. Men might want to shut them down, shut them up to keep the control that they “deserve”, i.e. that they inherited from families of the past.
This support of the past is akin to dragging undead parasites and injecting them into people’s minds. It is also like this, how beliefs we don’t agree with, are spread. Mind Viruses are everywhere, waiting to infect us. LGBTQ, Religion, Information Bubbles, hippie-nature bullshitters. Snow Crash. Infinite Jest. It’s all just people, trying to convince other people that their own view of the future is somehow right, and that their opponent’s view of the future is wrong.
Where these viruses differ, is in acknowledging the dead among us, and who it is that is trying to shrug maggot-filled weights off their shoulders. The conflicts between men and women are in effect, fought across the centuries, any time slice thinking it must be resolved within the momentary conversation at hand, despite it taking life times, where the ideas of equality of the sexes is crushed, over and over again, to rise as new life, fighting the dead: Light versus the dark. This light which resolves all issues pertaining to both sexes once and for all, is rooted in empathy.
We might state that the view holding empathy to a higher standard is itself a view defended by the past, as those most adjusted to society have first indulged in it before they learned how to even form new memories: Our young years in all of us train us in the ways of empathy, even while the tools to practice it have seen a massive decrease, due to imperial pasts conquering spaces meant to build these mirror neurons. But empathy is different from these imperial things, in that empathy is created over and over again.
This, not from the past, but from existing things in the now. Any single fiction book, and some non-fiction books as well, hold the key of training empathy. Podcasts, despite being the medium of the future, watered down, curated content, may try and replace those books with explanatory power, but you cannot argue with physics: Their neurological effects are different. Mirror neurons are not trained as much, and even die out over time.
Reading, as it turns out, is central to a nuanced mirroring procedure. Given the exhaustive nature of the act and the few obvious benefits that this skill gives us, it is impossible to convince anyone not reading this article to feel the discomfort that comes from scanning delimited glyph of high contrast, to voice their phonetic representations and integrate their meanings into a more coherent whole. With high-held computer-mediated audio, we might think that it performs the same function, while in truth, its attention grabbing nature makes us give little time to integrate the information.
Reading, in this respect, is unique. The massacres that come from large-scale abortions, along with women’s desire to be treated as their own interpretation of masculinity that, is what why men might try to crush them, while the way out of this mess, without violence, is for us to read widely, to challenge our beliefs, to never settle for the simple, and always strive for the complex, and see in fact, that there is little reason for true pain or suffering. In truth, all we need to do is to bridge the gap in our collective understanding of each other, and show us how we’re inconsistent.
Unfortunately, most men (and women) do not read in the ways that they should, with men leading the way of uninformedness. Men who have the time, who have strength, who don’t have any financial restrictions on thinking through a problem line by line, thought by thought, making inferences and suggestions along the way, are what in part is keeping humanity at bay, as they almost willfully refuse to understand the things that are surrounded by. Those men that do not have these luxuries cannot rise to the occasion, which means that it is (perhaps) up the upper-classes to push this liberation of the tyranny of ignorance to non-existence. It is people who are distracting us from forming our own thoughts that keep the future from arriving, while the other are those, who use the argument that they are disadvantaged, precisely to blanket their supposed curiosity about others. Fuck ‘em.
Ultimately, empathy is one of the few litmus tests for the powers of resolution. If you do not read widely and you can, you might be one of the agents keeping humanity from peace. If you praise those who hijack your attention for some earthly gains that do not matter once the water in our taps stops working, you are a problem.
If those you praise, suppress the reality of the end-of-the-world approaching, or if you just don’t care, or want riches flowing down your face, to rule over your own conquered empire and slaves who make you food and suck you off, in order to continue working on the nebulous dream of total independence, while being sick of the educated, sick of monopolies of morals, sick of universities, sick of others telling you that you are, or might be wrong. If you have obvious and aggressive reactions to all I said before, and disagree… that’s ok. You still matter. And your views are still not wrong to have.
And if you manage to extend your mind enough to come say hi…really come and greet me… I’ll be waiting.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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