Does it take a sociopath to not give a shit about the consequences of the tsunami?

Great Debates
1

In [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5671507&postcount=57]the flag at half mast thread , Metacom posted:

Is being a sociopath a prerequisite for not really caring about the tsunami and its victims? When I first heard about it, I ran the figures through my head, thought, “Oh wow, sucks to be them,” and continued doing what I was doing without another thought on the matter.

I have no connection on any level with the afflicted region. As a result, I do not, cannot feel sympathy for the victims of the flood. Yes, I can feel sympathy for those to whom I have a connection on some level. Yes, I can feel sympathy for those who I feel are unjustly harmed by those to whom I have a connection. But if I have no connection with the people or the cause of their problems, I am emotionally detached from them. In short, it would be wrong for me to bring them harm, but otherwise they are completely irrelevant within the confines of my thick skull.

I think that falls a bit short of the definition of sociopath. I’m sure that many (if few on the SDMB) share such a view. Debate, flame, whatever.

2

This is why travel is so important to a citizen. You cannot really understand your place in the world until you’ve seen the world.

3

What does that have to do with the OP? Unless you are going for the ‘brotherhood of man’ schtick in a round-about way…

4

I think people react differently. I don’t think sven’s point is terribly valid (or perhaps it is up to a point, but not much) because I don’t think we need to travel to every corner of the world to recognize and sympathize with human suffering—no matter in what part of the globe it’s occurring.

Some people may feel more of a response if they hear stories, read stories. Others may feel more of a response if they see footage. For many of us, it’s either or. I think that many non-sociopaths may not feel much because they don’t allow themselves time to do so. Or perhaps there’s something else. Hell, I don’t know. There’s obviously a lot more to it.

5

Actually I got to wonder about this.

More people are killed in the same region from traffic accidents, every year. More people are killed in the US and Europe from traffic accidents, every year. More children die of hunger and unclean water related sicknesses, every year. More are murdered, every year. More are killed in war, every year. Etc. Is it correct that this particular disaster should receive such massive attention just because it isn’t a recurring event, or it is unexpected, or it is easy to get on TV?

I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for any number of victims, unless I hear of a detailed account of specific cases. Kill ten thousand and nobody cares. Kill a single, and everybody cries. That’s not sociopath. That’s human nature. Unfortunately.

6

You mean, like 9/11?

7

No the tsunami is 9/11 times 100.

Yes that’s right 91.100!

8

I’m sorry, but if you get to post idiotic posts. So do I. But you’re undoubtedly going to tell me, you felt an instant connection on a deep and personal level with all those 150.000 unfortunate individuals the instant you heard of it – like you do with all those unfortunate traffic/murder/war/etc victims on a daily basis. That that’s just the kind swell person you are.

The terrorist attack on WTC, as the tsunami, was indeed made intimate and emotional by the detailed personal accounts from there. Someone posted a very moving story here on SDMB (can’t find it now) of an attempt to track down the individual of a particular famous image of a man who jumped from the towers. You can use the emotional connection with the individual to broaden it out to the multitude on an intellectual level – but not on an emotional level. Because that’s how humans are. We have personal relations with individuals, one person at a time. Not with a mass of people. But you are Jesus. You have the whole human race in your heart.

9

Paladud said he had no connection to the region whatsoever.

I do, because I was just on the streets of Pondicherry and Mammalapuram and Chennai a few months ago. I made friends with women and rickshaw drivers and fishermen and shopkeepers in the area. I’ll never know if that lovely woman I shared a bus ride from Madurai to Pondy made it. I won’t know about the rickshaw driver that slept right out side my open window as I’d listen to waves crash in the shore. Or the Russian I ran in to in the middle of the night on Anna Selai road in Chennei looking puzzledly at a map and trying to ask an dumbfounded Indian where the beach is- hopefully his beach going days didn’t last this long. I can picture the fishing boats and the women selling trinkets on the beaches…all gone now. They lost six Chinese fishing nets in Kochi, and I used to buy fish caught off those net and go to the street stalls where they will cook fresh fish for you to eat right there as you watch the fishermen.

And by extension, I can picture a resort in Phuket. I can picture the beach cabins and dogs in the streets and little tourist cafes selling warm cornflakes and attempted Israeli food. I can picture the skinny, handsome young men working early in the morning keeping the hotels running while the kids are just starting to swarm around the tourists trying to sell them piles of cheap sarongs and “real silver see madam” jewelry. I can picture a village in Sri Lanka, with the women drying fish in the morning while shirtless men in their colorful boats go out to sea. I can picture families from remote villages on vacation playing at the shore, the men frolicing deep in the waves while the women collapse in giggle as the surf laps at the edges of their saris. I can see the mosques of Indonesia, surrounded by colorful huddled houses, the dull calls to prayer filling the air waking up all the tourists in squalid backpacker’s hovels at decidedly ungodly hours.

It’s hard to really get the third world, and the scale of things there, without seeing it firsthand. I was totally unprepared, and the things I saw, and the reading I did (India has some very very good poltical magazines, and I think I exhausted every book on India I could find while I was there) changed the way I understand the world. That trip was a three month course in the rest of the world.

We never really think about it, but America is not the world. Canada is not the world. China and India are most of the world. Two billion of six billion, with a good chunk of the rest scattered around Africa, Asia and South America. Most human experience is a third world human experience. And it really is a completely different existance than what we know here. Suddenly I could make sense of all the waterstained green walls and string cots in Iraqi hospitals I’d see on TV. I could picture the images I’ve seen in Time about AIDS in Africa or overpopulation in China. All these images I’ve been seeing my whole life suddenly became something that made sense and was part of my world, not just some strange disconnected pictures of far off places.

I had to tell about half the people I know about the tsunami, several days after the event. News is picking up, but for a while it was just a blip. The most catastrophic event in our livetimes, and I was breaking the news to people several days afterwards. Do you really have any doubts that if this had happened in Europe everyone wouldn’t know about it right away? If England had gotten hit like Sri Lanka, and the sunbathers of Spain were wiped out just like those in Thailand, don’t you think people would be more upset around here, instead of debating wether or not lowering the flag is appropriate?

Of course they would. We understand Europe. We can picture it. We value their landmarks and cities and religious practices and traditions just a bit more than we do places like Sri Lanka and Indonesia, which are places most of us (including me) would be hard pressed to say more than a few sentances about. It makes sense- we are a Western society and most of our culture does come from Europe. But just a little bit of travel, really anywhere outside the developed world, can make the world a lot bigger and make a lot more things start to make sense and have value for us.

And I think America would be better off, overall, if we felt a bit more like part of the world.

10

This is very well-written, and makes a valuable point.

The last seven years I lived in my home town, we had three ice storms of far-above-normal destructiveness, and a microburst derecho storm one summer of almost equal damage. The year after I moved, Hurricane Floyd trashed the area east of where I now live.

I knew people who died in one of the ice storms. I knew people who lost a lot in each of those disasters (different people per disaster, but you understand what I’m saying).

I don’t connect with people over on the shores of the Bay of Bengal the way I do with them – but I can get a sense of what it must have been like from the (much less destructive) natural disasters I’ve seen firsthand.

That said, news media bring every occurrence home through 24/7 newscasts, and there is a point at which people tend to get “shellshocked” by this stuff – almost blasé, “it didn’t happen to me or mine, and people get hit by this sort of stuff every day somewhere.” That’s human nature; we can’t get worked up over everything that happens the way things coming home to impact us personally would.

Mercy includes both caring about the victims of natural disasters, and refusing to judge those who cannot identify with them, and go on about their daily lives.

11

Nothing much to add, really, to what Sven’s already said.

Except…while humans do suffer on a daily basis, in myriad ways, it rarely involves catastrophic loss of life in the same magnitude. Unfortunately, and we can assign blame wherever we feel it’s appropriate, many of us have a morbid, but effective coping mechanism: “It’s not in my back yard, so it’s not that big a deal”.

Seriously - how many of us have any decent recall of the Bali terrorist bombings?
Or any other non-local/national catastrophe? Yet I’d bet we’ll remember 9/11 as if it were yesterday, for the rest of our lives. Why? Because it happened in our back yard. As mercenary as it might seem, that’s the society in which we live. I don’t like it, but it does appear to be a sad but common mindset in this society.

Sociopathy doesn’t enter the equation, really.

12

Of course America is the world. As is Europe. Not the whole world. But no less the world than China or India or St. Helena and American experience no less valid than Chinese or Indian.

You make it sound like you think Americans are on average less concerned with the outside world than other people round the globe, Chinese and Indians. One could speculate whether Indonesians or Indians would have been more empathic than Americans had it been Venice Beach that had been inundated and Americans killed. Ale has been so kind as to drag 9/11 into this. How many official or spontaneous Indonesian and Indian donations were sent to victims of 9/11? The Danish Red Cross made a collection for 9/11 victims which was quite successful among common Danes, but which was also heavily criticised as being wrong.

There seem to be more Scandinavian than US casualties. One of the reasons so many Scandinavians flock to mainly Thailand is that Scandinavia this time of year is cold enough to freeze the balls off a goat. Another is that Thailand has become a popular sex-tourist destination. So I guess a number of Scandinavian men can empathise quite well. Don’t know if that is the kind of empathy you had in mind. (Incidentally you might also check the casualty figures from various Scandinavian countries and square it off with which countries have outlawed prostitution back home. I haven’t done it, but I’ve got a hunch they might reveal something or other).

I was in Thailand a few years back. I too can picture some of what it is like, and, though certainly not on a sex-tour, there is one certain woman whom I’ve been thinking very much about lately.

13

My God sven, I had to comment simply to say that was amazingly, breath-takingly beautiful. What you wrote actually came alive for me in a way that ties the ‘rest of the world’ in that one usually doesn’t get from much of anything. Just goes to reinforce my opinion that if I ever won the lotto, traveling would definitely be one of the the things to do lots of at the very top of my list of priorities. So, thank you very much for that. What incredible images to accompany one’s day.

On topic… I’ll leave my dog out of this fight because I have no desire to sound judgmental what-so-ever. Suffice it to say, I wish I didn’t care so freakin’ much about things that I can’t hardly do a damn thing about, don’t effect me the tiniest bit or doesn’t want my involvement anyway. That curse gets me in deeper trouble than almost anything you can imagine.

14

paladud:

I live in Manhattan and was able to stand on the sidewalk and watch the World Trade towers fall, and yet I had the same reaction because I didn’t know anyone who worked down there.

I don’t think it means one is a sociopath or an unfeeling clod or anything like that; it’s just that we already know death is in the world, and tragedy. What hits us emotionally are those things that either compel us to action or offend us in some way, demanding something of us.

15

I think this is pretty much how most people feel. I have no connections to Indonesia but nevertheless I do feel sympathy for their plight and I’m glad they’re getting aid. Ultimately I won’t be losing any sleep over the disaster.

Marc

16

Well here’s my unsupported lay opinion - which I’ve held for a long time. As far as a reaction to the news of the death of strangers ---- I think that if you were there and witnessed the event you would have a totally different reaction than you would if you witness ‘the news’ through some artifical, ‘unnatural’ means, like TV or the Internet. I don’t think that news that travels to us through ‘unnatural avenues’ creates the same reactions of empathy than you’d see if the events were witnessed directly. In other words - it could be that we’re just not genetically equiped to react that way. Yet, if you actually are there to see, hear, and smell the person suffer — it this suffering were around you every day, you might react differently whether you were directly suffering physically or not. So - I think being removed from the situations that would naturally trigger our responses of deep empathy - tend to cause those reactions not to happen. Simply pushing a button or clicking on an Internet site, I’d tend to think, just doesn’t put us there - in a way, it’s too abstract to elicit much beyond “that sucks.”
None of this means that we can’t or don’t (sometimes) rise above who we are as human animals - just most of us, most of the time don’t.

17

Look, just because you seem to lack the capacity for feeling empathy towards the life experiences of other people doesn´t mean that everyone does. Yes I felt a deep and connection to the victims of the tsunami the moment I heard of it simply because in my short 25 years of life I´ve learned to regard other people as more than lumps of flesh and bones. On of the more moving esperiences I endure frequently is just taking a good long look at my city from a tall building, there I can span the whole mosaic of individual lives on a single stare. Lives that mean just than a word, I´m talking about someone´s memories of their first kiss, the pain of a guy down there that has lost his father this morning or maybe someone, hidden invisible from above but that I´m sure it´s there that has just passed gas.
I can´t wrap my mind around every single person, I can barely do that to myself, but I certainly can project the sum of all those lifes into a whole, and I can relate myself to their joys and sufferings for the simple fact that I do have the same feelings as everyone else.
I can´t mourn every single death on Thailand, Sri Lanka, India end elsewhere, but I felt the collective loss of life, I can empathize with the people literally swept off this world in an instant, the horror of their last seconds of life and the grief of those left behind.
Oh, by the way…

First that for someone that has just showed his lack of empathy to other people unless you´re fed their accounts of life and death it´s quite an achivement to venture into the telepathy business, do you know James Randi is offering big money for a proven act of parapsichological powers?. You should try your act in front of him but not with me I´m affraid, because that leads to the second thing I wanted to add:

Second: don´t ever post crap like that about me again, I know damn well who am I and what my feelings and relationships with the rest of the world are; and you don´t have permission to fabricate strawmen out of my character to bash me with them, am I clear?

18

As I read that post, that’s not what Rune said. From my experience, what Rune stated is what appears to be the reaction of the large, large majority of us. Rune doesn’t use these words - but, IMO, until we know somebody or something, it remains an ‘object’ out there - undefined. Only once we come to know someone do they become unique to us and only then, for most of us at least, does bad news concerning that person elicit the deep responses you’ve described -

19

I witness, via TV, the profound sorrow of men and women who have lost children to this disaster. I cannot imagine anything worse than having to lift a cover off of a dead child and being face to face with your own. The agony those parents show has broken my heart; I am unable to watch for more than a few seconds without breaking down. My connection to those victims is very real to me, yet Marcie, who I know to be a kind, caring, decent person doesn’t feel the same depth of emotion as I. Certainly she is not a monster or a sociopath, she is just not affected the same way I am. We all react differently.

20

I am an extremely empathetic person. I’ve cried at seeing small lost children and most sad movies and tv shows make me cry unless they are really stupid. That being said, hearing that 100,000 people died doesn’t/didn’t make me sad. Seeing pictures of dead bodies strewn all over beaches didn’t/doesn’t make me cry. When I watch the videos of water rushing people in and hear the screams and see people being washed away to their certain doom, I feel a twing of pain, but not much.

It wasn’t until I saw the video of the sobbing mother going into hysterics while holding her dead child that I felt tears well up in my eyes. The survivors always hurt me more than those who died. The dead, while their deaths may have been painful, are no longer in pain.

But, I’ve found that when I cry at things, I am rarely crying for things, just at the situation in general. It’s hard to explain and I certaintly couldn’t give you a reason for it. Funerals always make me cry as long as there are other people crying. Seeing people cry just makes me sad and want to cry myself. I could go to the funeral of the worst monster and if everyone there was sobbing, I would start crying too.

I know I don’t care about the actual death of the person, it’s just an instinct or something. Evolutionary, it makes sense for the mood of a group of people to be infective and just as being in a group of happy people can cheer me up, so can seeing crying people make me want to cry.

However, I don’t think that people who don’t get upset over these things are abnormal. The school hostage situation made me cry more than the tsunami, although I couldn’t explain to you why that would be so. I would be more concerned over a person who cried over the tsunamis and donated nothing then a person who was stoic about it all.

My ex could be called a sociopath because his attitude towards this whole thing is “there are too many people already” I wouldn’t say he regards it as a good thing, but he definitly doesn’t think of it as a bad thing. He, of course, is not donating any money.