Selective Empathy Can Chip Away at Civil Society

This is actually a key mechanism for what's wrong, socially, with pretty much everything these days. It fits right in with the concept of The Long Tail.

We get to selectively apply our preferences now, for our unique musical tastes to hear any artist, and thus only those we like; an infinite choice of movies, and thus never the fixed schedules of centralized broadcasts; we can binge on an entire series in a weekend, commercial free, viewing dozens of hours, watching itall in one sitting; browse unlimited archives of text, applying search appliances to a corpus of text, to randomly access select passages ona whim, in ways notpossible with a conventional library of physical volumes.

So too, now, we apply this tendency to the company we keep. We ghost people. We provide votes to rank performance, and perform to score points in a virtualized hypertext context (it's not really a community, it's just web pages still, despite all you may know about interaction, javascript, live video streams, chat, texts, telecommunications and telepresence, social media profiles, blogs, photo sharing... even AR and VR, and second life type avatars... it's all actually still pretty primitive with leaky abstractions everywhere, to be quite honest). Dating random people has exploded in ways not possible with classified ad sections in print media, or even dating services that played match maker, decades ago.

So it's this impulsive, push-button tendency toward instant gratification, creeping in atthe edges of every facet society. The combinatorial explosion of random access awareness to everything we can expose ourselves to, limited only by the pace we set for ourselves. Far from sheltered in an informational sense, now armed with a much broader context of understanding, determined by whichever choices are fortuitous enough to present themselves to us in an endless chain of relational links or rungs we climb, as we negotiate a landscape of media consumption to learn and inform ourselves. With this awareness, we build the context to pass further judgement, stored in a buffer of medium-term memory, like driving at night, with the high beams on, following road signs, but only ever being led to fast food pit stops, big box stores and gas stations, and hotels. Never a home to reside in. No family to speak of, just strangers on the street, it seems.

So that buffer of medium-term memory dictates which peers receive love, who gets the ranking votes, why we buy junk food from this gas station, but not the other.

It's not going away.

It can't be simply destroyed and directly eliminated.

The void left behind will force something to regrow in its place.

This way of life is here to stay. It's going to harden and calcify in this disposition, unless we find a new way; a replacement to unseat it. To fix the broken parts. A way forward.

The definition of tribes is a social construct. The existence of tribes is not.

Reformers who seek to abolish tribalism usually find that they've simply redrawn the boundary lines and replaced one set of tribes with another. The dogmatism of the Church gets replaced by the patriotism of the State. Racism gets replaced by classism. Discrimination on appearance gets replaced by discrimination on education.

Sometimes just this redefinition of groups is progress: I'd argue that group boundaries based upon choices or values are more useful than group boundaries based on origins or genetics. But the utopian vision of "and the world will be as one" is naive, and ignores basically all recorded history.

Maybe Civil Society's empathy was exploited a bit too much, a bit too brazenly. If that's the reason, insisting the show must go on won't get you much empathy.

Ammon Bundy is the example they use? Ammon Bundy supports migrants because he's a rancher and wants cheap labor on his ranch. He wants taxpayers to bear the cost so he can privately profit. That's why people are suspicious about "empathy," it's usually a way of manipulating your emotions so that other people can profit.

The pot calling the kettle black, rubbing it in with a dictionary description spun into a book. How humiliating to have spent time here.