Empathy and Manipulation

A miserably long time ago,

when I had a completely different set of in-laws,

we drove to Texas to visit a brother-in-law. 

I heard myself imitating his way of talking,

and staggered back, inside, hoping

that he did not think I was making fun of him.

It happened without intention.

All of us have friends who have lived overseas

for ten or twelve days, and come home

talking about the telly, or the loo,

Ciao-ing us, and getting everything spot on.

They tell us they had not realized

they had suddenly become cos-mo-pol-itan!,
that their diction had changed forever.

Imitation is the sincerest form of conformity.

An article in Natural History magazine--
(Bodies in Sync) explains how out cousins,
chimpanzees, imitate each other, yawning together,
laughing together, in a kind of contagion of imitation.
We human beings do the same, helpless to stop
yawning, laughing together at the sound of laughter.
We "go along".  It is how children learn to become
satisfactory children.  We feel the feelings
of others, feeling sad, feeling happy, or afraid.
That is how we fit in.

People who teach know they need to get their students
to resonate, to feel the excitement of an idea,
to love the mystery of a problem, the anguish
of a dilemma, and the excitement of a resolution.

Performers know they are successful
when we laugh together with them,
when we weep at what saddens them.
If they are good, we feel empathy:  we imitate.

All of us descend from a long evolutionary history,
obvious in us, evident in ancestral species,
that has selected for mimicry;
for genuinely feeling what others feel.

The good of that is that it makes us fit in. 
It enables caring.  We express sympathy
because we do feel empathy; that is to say,
that we watch, see, feel what others feel.
It makes for great motherhood, for brother-
and sisterhood.  It makes diverse immigrants into a nation.

It also makes fascism possible.
When we are mesmerized by the passion of political manipulators,
we feel their anger; their frustratation, their dreams. 
Religious evangelists cultivate our habits of empathy.
They tell us how they have sinned,
in their pants and in their hearts. 
They humiliate themselves, and redeem themselves,
and we say we know just what they mean. 
We feel their sins and their silk-suited redemption.
We are at one with them.

Feelings and passions are at least as powerful as reason.
In the heat ofour common feelings we do things
that common sense, and reason, later,
tell us were stupid and destructive. 
We get caught up in what everyone is saying and doing;
a kind of contagious yawn, or laughter, or mob.

Shrewd politicians know that what they say
is probably not as effective as how they say it,
whether they can cause others to resonate, and imitate them.
They shout, Liar!", or sing their anxieties or fears
or hatreds until the people around them feel what they feel,
chant what they chant, believe what they say,
vote as they do, and buy a gun.

Our virtues are always our vices.
We are the products of unexamined urges.
Something whispers inside us.
It has been a good thing, this empathy,
this unexamined urge to imitate.
The really devious manipulate those urges. 

The manipulators know what they are doing. 
They aren't feeling our pain. 
They are creating it, shaping it, using it.

What makes us human, and not just lizards or apes,
is that part of our brain that overlays those deep urges
to go along, not to deprive us of unthinking empathy,
but to pause, and think about things.