Phantom Barriers

Empathy is a misunderstood virtue. It could be because empathy is an arduous task. So arduous, in fact, we create imaginary requirements to decide the benefactors of our empathy. Empathy justifies itself as a human emotion/reaction, but it needs knowledge to complement it.

Therein lies the problem; Knowledge. While knowledge is not a virtue, it is a skill that helps us evaluate our options and consequently leads to insightful decisions. Some barriers (and there are many) that prevent us from making insightful decisions are often due to incomplete or inaccurate information, intentionally distributed and corroborated by disingenuous peoples of authority. 

I thought of inaccuracy late last year as one of the reasons Adam McKay’s, “Don’t Look Up”, falls short as the satire it purported to be. It treats climate change as a pending and external disaster, instead of an increasingly internal catastrophe that has already displaced and affected millions of people. This is not to say the movie failed as a satire completely, it does a relatively good job of satirizing our inept and often apathetic politicians, superficial celebrities, and despicable media personalities. But, by making the threat external, it undermines the intrinsic structural change needed to combat climate change. Furthermore, a meteorite heading towards earth is a bipartisan issue and is demonstrably understood as such.

Climate change, while also being a bipartisan issue is not generally understood as such, there are prominent deniers and profiteers. 

Even if McKay’s movie fails as a perfect allegory, it does highlight our unwillingness to recognize imminent danger until it is too late, and it depicts the insensibility, and psychopathic nature of our politicians, their ability to make unilateral decisions that affects tens and thousands of lives, with practically no consequences. As their decisions become operational, their effects can be devastating. Politicians, like the ones depicted in “Don’t Look Up”, are responsible for a lot of public anxiety by obfuscating critical information and prioritizing their own economic interests— over those they have been elected to speak for. The concentrated nature of power and the advent of corporations as persons has affected every facet of our life, including our ability to empathize.

Empathy, idiomatically known as “putting yourself in one’s shoe,” requires a lot of work and knowledge to achieve. One of the most effective ways of practicing empathy is to stop seeing how people are different from one another and embrace our “otherness”.

The first step in dehumanizing people is by ostracizing them, either systematically, socially, or both. The ridiculing of “others” is pervasive because it relegates fellow human beings to feeling like second class citizens, and the results are internecine. Empathy is arduous, but it is a skill best developed by first removing the phantom barriers that society reinforces. People are people first. People are not the country they come from. They are not their sexual orientation. They are not their race. People are not whatever term we have decided to blanket them with, their humanity comes first.

People are archetypes, not stereotypes.

Akin Adegok