Empathetic Actions (Post Unit 1 Socratic Seminar)

When watching something like a slasher film, or some other horror movie, seeing a character sustain or fall from a wound inflicted upon them by a villain always makes me cringe and feel some of the pain that the character is feeling. I try to avoid at all costs the moments when a person falls victim to physical pain and wounds, because it makes people like me feel unwanted empathy, which is also the reason that I don't like that genre of films. People like my sister, and one of my uncles whom I know so well, don't look away when watching the same scenes as me, and don't cringe when the moment where pain is inflicted onto a character. Knowing how my sister appears to be kind and caring around her own friends, but unfeeling in this situation, I realized soon after that sympathy and empathy are different things, and to some degree, I believe that just because one has one trait, doesn't mean that the other will inhabit the same individual. However, at the same time, it can be said that if one experiences the specific type of pain felt before, sympathy for others who are known to receive the same type of pain, grows from the person with the certain experiences.

It hurts hypothetically to know someone or be around one individual who cannot feel the pain that we are feeling at a certain moment, because as social creatures of habit, we prefer to have some comfort among others in social interaction, people who can make us feel better and help us out in need for the sake of friendship or love. Many times, however, involves suffering of individuals who do not have the same safety or having others that share their experiences, and others who completely lack empathy, and thus lack the necessary chemicals the share others' experiences. In this sense, empathy is merely but a chemical that connects us as human beings that share a sense of humanity; it allows us to be with one another, and either share or disagree with views put forward to act as either 'good' or 'bad' beings.

If empathy is but a mere chemical compound that follows a normal distribution among human beings, high in a few, even in frequency at a medium amount in most, or in low amounts, or even nonexistent in a few as well, it still is probably the most important thing for us to act as human beings, and allows connection with others around us. From an early age, people can learn the feeling of pain, i.e. when touching an oven that is on, and burns one of our fingers, we respond by creating a sensory memory of an oven being hot that burns us, and that we should not touch it in the future based on experience. If empathy exists in an individual, then when we see another person burn their finger by touching a hot oven, we can either feel their pain to some extent, or even feel a sense of sympathy for the pain they have just experienced. If one lacks empathy however, that individual most likely cannot feel the same pain the other has experienced, even though they themselves have probably faced before, but nonetheless either feel sympathy because they were taught to, or do not feel any sympathy as well whatsoever. In this sense, in society, the pain that others face in their lifetimes can either be reflected by the world community as a whole, or let go because most people (or just the leaders) in another community lack the necessary empathy to formulate a societal definition of what is wrong and what is right when looking at the pain another group faces. Empathy then must be the gateway for individuals to decide what they feel affects themselves and not just others in terms of good and evil, and just because one part of society may think something is bad because it is not on par with what their standards on good are (much of society has empathy and shares a uniform standard of good and evil in most cases), another group may think the opposite way.