Weaponized Empathy vs the Vance Glance
Weaponized Empathy
Weaponized Empathy has been holding us prisoner ever since Political Correctness arose in the late 1980s.
This one attack had brought the entire West to our knees, destroyed Christendom, devastated Europe, and done unimaginable damage to America.
One attack, used over and over and over. It goes:
“Oh, aren't you a Christian? Why don't you feel sorry for them? Wouldn’t a good Christian do X.”
…where X is something that isn’t good, but which the average Christian cannot articulate why it is not good, so they fall for it.
The truth is, however, that when you're overly empathetic to a group that may not actually deserve empathy, you are inadvertantly callous to the group they are harming.
If you're overly empathetic to violent criminals, you're being callous to innocent victims.
If you're overly empathetic to men who've come into your country from another culture, so much so you don't report their crimes because you're afraid of public opinion turning on them, you are callous towards the innocent victims of those crimes.
If you're overly empathetic towards people who want to change their sex, you are callous towards the harm that merely saying a lie such as “men and women can switch places” is doing to children, who rely on us to be honest with them about the nature of the universe in which we all live.
The same idea, presented slightly differently destroyed Tzarist Russia. You can see it in Ayn Rand’s semi-autobiographical novel We the Living. For the Russians, it was not Weaponized Empathy, but Weaponized Altruism. The desire to be altruistic was abused until people had to perform impossible slave labors or be what we now call canceled (which might there have involved jail time) for not being altruistic enough.
(If you have ever paused to wonder where Ayn Rand got such a bizarre idea as “It is good to be selfish,” it was because she was trying to fight back against the Weaponized Altruism that had destroyed her childhood Russia, and she failed to draw the line between “Don’t let people push you to do things that are harmful to yourself” and “Altruism itself is evil.” )
Weaponized Empathy has done tremendous harm. It both pushes Christians to act in ways that they know they don’t want to—under the false idea that they are unChristian if they don’t—and tends to encourage people to stop trusting and believing in Christ.
Enter…the Vance Glance
For about forty years, this one argument has held sway over our whole society and Europe, too. It has allowed us to be backed into impossible corners where things that should never have happened can’t even be complained about.
It has left people, particularly men, I believe, feeling weak and impotent. Everyone knew they were being manipulated, but they weren’t sure how to fight back.
Until this January, when Vice President JD Vance responded to a variant of this Weaponized Empathy with the now-immortal words: “I really don’t care, Margaret.”
This simple response set off a firestorm of applause and adulation. At first, I was puzzled as to why. Then, I realized:
Vance, by basically putting words to his also-now-immortal Vance glance (see above), had refused to take the Weaponized Empathy bait.
He had parried the attack that has brought several continents to their knees, simply by rejecting its underlying lie: which is…that you are not a good person if you don’t do whatever it is that the speaker is trying to manipulate you to do.
Vance understands that while we can have compassion in our hearts for everyone, we cannot help everyone. Therefore, we must have a hierarchy of duty that guides our decisions as to what is and is not right for us to do.
More importantly, though, Vance is also not a callous man.
He is not advocating cruelty, or lack of concern for others. He is a man who wants what is best for his family, his community, his nation.
He is even a man who would like what is best for strangers and those from other nations…so long as helping them does not directly harm his family, his community, or his nation.
And that is the difference between the victim of Weaponized Empathy and a just Christian.
When you start harming those closest to you—those to whom you have the strongest duties—to supposedly help those you do not know, you are definitely not living up to the virtues that supposedly pushed you to act to begin with.
The Good Samaritan did a noble thing. He helped a man who was not of his race. He tended his wounds with his own oil and vinegar. (Always tempted to make a salad joke at this point in the story.) He used his own money to put him up at an inn.
But there are also many things he did not do: He did not take the wounded man home. He did not stay and spend the rest of his life tending to him. He did not even pause on his travels once he got him to the inn.
And yet, Weaponized Empathy expects such devotion of its victims. It pushes and pushes and pushes what is expected.
If we let it push too far, we will end up like Soviet Russia. Our freedoms, even our lives, lost because we could not stand up against this blatantly false trick.
We will lose all that is good about our culture, and even our civilization, because we were unwilling to say: “I really don’t care, Margaret.”
The things that Weaponized Empathy push us to do are not true and good.
If you are a true Christian, you will put your sympathy where your duty requires it to go. While kindness to all is a virtue, the question is: To whom do you have a duty?
Which side are you going to favor if you can only favor one?
Do not the innocent deserve more of your sympathy and protection than perpetrators?
We need to stop hiding crimes and statistics in a false desire to protect some race or group and start standing up for the innocent and speaking the truth.
And, more important, we need to remember this: If we are actually Christians, we are not just concerned for our neighbor’s ease of body, but also for his immortal soul.
It does the immortal soul of a perpetrator no good for you to coddle him.
For his sake, speak out!
Do not hide crimes. Do not placate madness. Do not turn a blind eye to turmoil.
“And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matthew 10:28 )
A useful revelation several days ago. Tolerance is not a Christian virtue.
Mercy is, and it is not mercy to enable people in their evil.
Obvious enough once thought of.
"(If you have ever paused to wonder where Ayn Rand got such a bizarre idea as “It is good to be selfish,” it was because she was trying to fight back against the Weaponized Altruism that had destroyed her childhood Russia, and she failed to draw the line between “Don’t let people push you to do things that are harmful to yourself” and “Altruism itself is evil.” )"
Thank you! I haven't studied in depth but just what I had picked up from osmosis and some references, it struck me that Ayn Rand was attempting to create a morality that communism could not infect and corrupt.
Which... yeah leads to different issues, but you can at least understand that goal.