In Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s most recent exercise in cinematic moralism, empathy is described as a “superpower”—since it is the power of a super-race of anthropoid aliens who think that humanity ought to emulate them by using it. What is meant by “empathy,” however, is a kind of mind-reading that can be used by Emily Blunt’s character, the one human being who, thanks to the aliens, is really good at it, to manipulate others into doing what she wants them to do. You can see how, if it were real, this would be a superpower.
As we use the word “empathy” today, however, we most often mean by it something like accepting other people at their own emotional self-evaluation. This is what I feel; now I need you to validate that feeling by telling me that you can feel it too, right along with me. That sounds more like a superweakness than a superpower to me, but admittedly we are now living in the kind of upside-down world where weakness often is translatable into strength, if you know how to do it. And more and more people these days do know how to do it.
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