Empathy is a cruel trap. It allows us to feel every hit on an animals back or become the scared child hiding from an abusive parent but never allows us to be present to stop it.
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
- Gustav M. Gilbert, German-speaking American prison psychologist at Spandau prison in Berlin, where Nazi war crimes defendants were held, 1945
Empathy is a cruel trap. It allows us to feel every hit on an animals back or become the scared child hiding from an abusive parent but never allows us to be present to stop it.