[FRIAM] Trump as a victim

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen, 

 

I don't think of empathy as something that you gin up; it either happens to you, or it doesn't.  And then you decide what you want to do with your empathy.  As a child, perhaps,, did you ever read any of Ernest Thompson Seton's (no relative) Lives of the Hunted?  The wolf, terror of the Corrumpaw (?), wily killer of sheep, evader of traps, lies before you in a cage, wounded and helpless.  You feel empathy.  And so you kill it.  Anybody who tells you that you should feel empathy lacks empathy for your lack of empathy.  I WILL feel empathy for Trump when he's tried.   I dread those trials.  In fact, even watching him twist and lie and twist and lie, watching him contort, makes me queasy inside, like  watching a man tortured.  But empathy, like rage, is just another emotion, and needs, like all emotions, to be tempered with reason.  

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 6:54 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Trump as a victim

 

A collection of people, who shall remain nameless, recently tried to shame me for objecting to their waste of empathy for poor lil ol Trump, in light of his infection. One argument went something like "His father was horrible." One primary argument went something like "empathy begets empathy". Empathy is not zero-sum. Etc.

 

I started my objection to all this Trump-as-a-victim talk by listing several aspects of his CHARMED LIFE, like the fact that he's lucky enough to have lived to a ripe old age (when so many of us die young), he was born wealthy (when so many of us live our entire lives dirt poor), his stupid TV show was wildly successful (when so many of us are serial failures), his weaponized litigousness has benefited him throughout his life (when so many of us can't even afford a lawyer). Etc. 

 

All that *privilege* has been bestowed upon him. And it seems, to me, he's squandered it all. He reminds me of those pitiful pictures of Saddam Hussein in court and then prison and then dead. Oh boo-hoo, poor little dictator being mistreated. Such sentiments are not merely weird to me. If game theory and the success of simplistic tit-for-tat has taught us anything, it is that the algorithmic *depth* required to beat straightforward (poetic) "justice" is academically interesting, but pragmatically degenerate.

 

So, no. I will not waste any of my finite lifetime feeling sorry for poor lil ol Trump, our Privilege Squanderer in Chief. If that magically limits my ability to empathize in some other context, so be it. If it implies that when I die pathetically, under some bridge, eating partial hamburgers from the Wendy's dumpster, my colleagues *rightly* avoid wasting their finite lifetimes feeling sorry for me, then I'm ready for that day. Like it or not, tu quoque is a fallacy.

 

--

↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe  <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

archives:  <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC  <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20201007/f5f6d0e4/attachment.html>