Empathy Liberal Style: Not Worth A Bucket Of Spit

There’s a post I first saw over at the lovely and charming Dr. Helen’s blog that has been slowly making the rounds. Here’s the story and Greg Gutfeld’s take on it,

So according to new research, today’s college students are 40 percent less empathetic than kids their age thirty years ago.

…I blame parents and teachers who let toxic strains of feel-good self-esteem and phony sentimentality invade their homes and classrooms. The end result: people thinking it’s cooler to care for strangers than their own families. It’s okay to divorce your wife of twenty years, as long as you volunteer at the homeless shelter. You owe thousands in rent to your roommate, but no worries: you helped build a latrine in Peru. This new self-love created a driving hunger for recognition — and your caring soul lets you be a jerk to the people who matter.

And now it’s egged on by the web and it’s infectious blanket of social networking — which creates an illusory sense of intimacy that was once sated by the real intimacy of a neighborhood.

You have people paying more attention to a stranger across the globe, than their aging mother. Thank God her nurse isn’t on Twitter, or granny would have no one to talk to.

In the new egalitarianism, you must forget the concentric circles of real people around you. And you shouldn’t love your parents more than any one else. And, really, why should your money go to feeding your offspring, when the world’s a mess? We’re all in this together!

This really resonated with me for two reasons.

1) The attitude Gutfeld’s describing is liberalism at its core. Liberals are constantly congratulating themselves for how compassionate they are — but only with other people’s money. They never stop railing against “hate” — even as they spew it everywhere by slandering anyone who disagrees with them in any way as a racist, Nazi, hatemonger. They never stop talking about how much they care about people — but they work to systematically destroy the church, the free enterprise system, morals, patriotism — in other words, anything and everything that makes people’s lives better that doesn’t help liberals get elected to office.

I’m not saying that there aren’t any liberals who are good people, give to charity, or treat people the way they should be treated, because obviously, that’s not true. What I am saying is that liberalism is the philosophy adopted by folks who want to treat people who come into their lives like trash and still feel like they’re kinder, more compassionate, and have bigger hearts than everyone else.

2) What Gutfeld said — and what I just described, reminds me of a quotation from C.S. Lewis’ classic book, The Screwtape Letters. For those that are unfamiliar with it, here’s a description,

“The book, which was written way back in 1942, is supposed to be a series of letters from a devil named Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood, about how to woo a Christian away from God…”

Here is some of Screwtape’s advice about how to tempt a man to sin,

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus become wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.

Isn’t that what Gutfeld’s describing? Isn’t that what so much of liberalism has become? Malice that’s “wholly real” and benevolence that’s “largely : imaginary?”

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