Empathy – 34th Tenet

Empathy is the 34th tenet of Motivationology:

Empathy is the capability of understanding the feelings, situation, and experience of another person. Most importantly, empathy can be used to defend the weaknesses of a person to then focus on their strengths.

To test Empathy:

Empathy tests. They’re effective.

You show a case of a person’s weaknesses and can watch what the person does in response. Do they exploit or cover up/protect the weaknesses?

Sometimes, having empathy or not is genetic. However, empathy can also be trained or taught by showing the right way to react to a situation. Most people have levels of empathy or the capability of learning more about it.

The bystander effect – it’s actually trained through laws and culture. In reality, more empathy can be trained into a population by teaching protecting weaknesses instead of spotlighting weaknesses. Examples of cases can be used.

Laws can either compel people to help, or hinder them from helping.

Let’s take the Duty to Care/Duty to Rescue Laws versus nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) or liability *if* you help someone. Some countries *require* people to have medical equipment in their cars and to help people on the side of the road (namely, in European countries, e.g., I heard of it being required in Romania). However, America uses the false threat of punishment for helping others. Liability threatened if you do. Or, in some cases, real threat is occurring to those helping (same for Britain and other areas) due to power struggles.

By compelling liability if you don’t help or if you don’t say something – that creates more empathy.

By compelling liability if you do help or say something – that creates indifference or even more abuse.

The USA has a high crime rate and prisoner rate, though laws can be stringent. Some countries choose social aid more, which reduces crime overall. They also have more *empathetic* laws.

There is little empowerment on the front lines to rescue, than there is to track and to harass. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s upside down. Literally anything used to harm in this way could be spun differently to the opposite, simply by studying the effects.

Further, individuals can compel others to help. For example, defense is can be also a large part of Motivationology. But what and who are you defending? How you do it, and how the people work together is a part.

Openness creates transparency. Secrecy creates the ability for manipulative actors to retain information in order to exploit the public and people. However, of course levels can be used, but overall, the situation of rescue or harm is upside down.

The goal of Motivationology is to empower a person. If you empathize with a victim, you can empower them through situations. Empowerment is the most motivational. There is nothing wrong with empowered victims, rather than “survivors.” Although survival is a tenet, it does not necessarily need to be a requirement.

Too much security in the wrong hands, can be exploitative and restrictive. Security and safety in the right hands can be empowering.

So how do you know if a person has empathy? What do they do when they see weaknesses or opportunity? Is the urge to exploit, or is the urge to defend? That’s the question.

Example videos:

This channel was an experiment to see what people would do.

It was hard to find examples and to gather them up: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfupACwUQmP2H6pDehATVXA