https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FAcolFkYvig
My sense in reading your books is so there is this sensoriousness or that’s something you could be criticized about For and i’m sure and you can tell me about that. I’m sure you have been criticized for that um, and you know you you you’ve written Provocative tracks like the toxic cult of sentimentality Which is a real dagger in some sense. I mean because people Let’s not call it sentimentality for a moment. Let’s call it empathy or sympathy and you make a case that I think and correct me if i’m wrong that excessive empathy unthinking sympathy is Has has uh can produce catastrophic consequences because it’s not tempered by judgment and and then I look at the personality Literature, you know, we have two moral personality traits roughly speaking One is agreeableness And so people who are high in agreeableness are empathetic and sympathetic and self-sacrificing and perhaps resentful because of it So it’s not an untrammeled virtue. Whereas the disagreeable types are more likely to be imprisoned So that’s a predictor of of of antisocial behavior, but they’re they’re implacable and stubborn and hard to push around and so people vary on that distribution um, I think agreeableness is a The empathy dimension is a trait that’s particularly good for fostering the care of infants because infants immediate empathy with an infant under six to nine months is Almost invariably the right response if the infant is crying or in distress Your job isn’t to question or judge. It’s to alleviate the source of the trouble And it’s very hard to take care of infants and it’s no wonder that there’s a moral virtue that’s essentially devoted to the care of True dependence But we have conscientiousness too And conscientiousness is the best predictor of long-term life success apart from iq and conscientious people are good at um Keep formulating and keeping contracts long-term contracts. It’s sort of a cold virtue and they are judgmental but As far as i’m concerned, we wouldn’t have both these personality traits like they’re two of five So it’s not like it’s a trivial proportion of the variation in personality. We wouldn’t have two of our five personality traits Aimed at regulating our behavior if empathy alone was sufficient And so you go after it the toxic cult of sentimentality. What do you mean by that? well, I mean the if you like the the infantilization of of people who are expressing emotion so We accept now that uh, I mean there’s if someone If someone expresses distress We don’t inquire where that distress comes from How it arose we just simply try to alleviate it Um oscar wild of course said that sentimentality is the Desire to have the emotion without the without the cost of the emotion um I suppose sentimentality is to uh Is uh is to empathy what kitch is to art? um And so what would you regard? Okay, so let’s let’s you Get it get it. I’ll give you an I mean I start the book with an example Which I read in my local newspaper, which was of a man Who bought a chicken in a supermarket? uh and roasted it or and then Uh gave it to you know, they were eating their dinner and the girl Uh, the little girl finds that there are chickens feet in it and screams with horror And so the father the child is so horrified That the father says I don’t know whether this is what he did literally, but I had to throw it out of the window So he just took the emotion of the child and said I have to assuage that emotion Any way I can and the quickest way is the best because of course She would have less emotion if it’s dealt with quickly So there’s no there’s no rational there’s no attempt to argue rationally about About this that actually chickens do have feet That they were live creatures once and this is something that children Have to learn It’s one of the things that children have to know and so what’s the problem with reflexive empathy? Exactly What well, it’s not exactly empathy actually, okay. Okay. I think it’s not genuine Well, then we should define it genuine empathy. We should define genuine empathy and distinguish it from counterproductive sentimentality Yeah, well, it’s not it’s not easy of course. No fair enough I I know i’m i’m putting you on the spot in this i’m saying that that’s something that could be productively attempted Yes I’m not sure I have the complete answer to that Uh, you you you you you’re you’re hitting at it from all sorts of different directions though you know like one of the things that that emerges from your book and and you know, I I saw you as someone who wanted genuinely to Be of help to the people that you were seeing and tortured by this constant immersion that you had in absolute bloody nightmarish catastrophe Like to a degree that I don’t really understand how you managed Outraged by what you saw outraged by the thoughtless contribution of skeptical and critical intellectuals to this Suffering which is swept under the table in some sense or or attributed only to you know, the power hungry Depredations of capitalism or something like that. And so you’re outraged by that and you’re trying to use your capacity for Judgment to help your clients your patients distinguish between those things that they’re doing that clearly hurt them and Those things that help them and also to attribute to them the capacity to do that which like I was talking to my wife today She we were talking about a woman she’s dealing with who is having a hard time disciplining her one and a half year old And you know I mentioned to her that one of the things i’ve seen among especially my seriously affected clinical clients is that they actually have no Idea that they could change their behavior in a manner that would improve the future That as a concept that’s not part of the subculture that they’re embedded in and that’s so counterproductive and unhelpful just hinting at how we also of course give them incentives not to think like that because If you have us if in fact you have a situation in which Changing their behavior will not Improve that certainly their economic situation very much Which is actually the condition would the situation of many of my patients that takes away one of the possible incentives for changing behavior and Why is it that that finding gainful employment for example isn’t going to produce a material change in circumstances? Why how is it that this is at the level of detail? Because you many people if they go to work They lose benefits. They have to start paying for things which were previously paid for them. So they end up going to work For x number of hours and being And being Very slightly better off in monetary terms, which doesn’t seem to them to be worth it And I can understand that So you’re asking them to do low level job get up maybe at six o’clock in the morning And furthermore, of course, it’s not good for their children because often they are single parents So they’ve got no support at home other than Other than whatever it is the state provides them And uh, they had so they have to manage their children and going to work when it’s very difficult for them Right for no for no economic incentive for well, I mean they are little marginally better Well, maybe maybe they have to buy clothes. There’s it’s expensive to work to enter the workforce. It’s not trivial They have to arrange transportation That’s also an expense and then you said child care that’s a devastating expense because most people who Would work on the margins don’t make enough money to afford child care at all, let alone child care of any quality And so so it also means that this in this unwillingness to pass judgment, let’s say on the part of helpers um Also means that we’re we abdicate our responsibility to design social welfare systems That would reward productive behavior because we don’t want to make the judgments about what behaviors are productive And what aren’t at least partly because we don’t want to make mistakes and throw people out that are deserving, but we can’t differentiate but then because we won’t make those judgments we produce systems that counter-productively reward the kinds of behaviors that produce the problems we want to solve