Sympathy vs. Empathy

This is a long video. It’s a pretty good video, though. It’s quite soothing to listen to and there are really a lot of good movies in there, with lovingly curated clips of all of them. I like to watch these things to see if there’s something I can add to my movie list. I’ve been doing this for a long time, so everything that looked interesting to me … had also already been consumed by me. 🤷🏼‍♂️

The video has a pretty clickbait-y title, but the author is someone I’ve followed for a while, and I’m forced to forgive some of my mainstays for bending to the will of the algorithm in their video titles in order to maintain and grow their audience.

The 50 Most Life-Changing Movies Ever Made by Like Stories of Old (YouTube)

In this video, as he’s discussing the movie “The Big Short” (excellent movie), which is about the 2008 financial crisis, and stars many of the financial bros who were behind the scam. The author of the video says that the director and story made him “empathize with the characters, which is not the same as sympathize,” which immediately made me think that of an earlier question posed by a good friend (in which he posed the question“would you say that “informed sympathy” is the same as empathy”).[1] The video author’s comment made me think I’d missed something in my answer to him, which was just “yes”.

Thinking about it some more, I think that the difference is that it’s possible to empathize with something for which you have no sympathy. I can empathize with a soldier who’s seen and done horrors—doing what he has been told his entire life is his job. He’s terrorized families, ripping them asunder. He returns home, descends into alcohol and other drugs, and does the same to his own family. I can empathize—that is, I can understand why he’s doing what he’s doing and, possibly, realize that, had I been indoctrinated in the same way, and begun life with the same innate talent and intellect, and suffered/endured the same upbringing, then I would have been unable to avoid his fate—but I cannot sympathize with him, because there is nothing sympathetic there. He is a monster. We should avoid making more.

Perhaps shorter: empathy can bridge wider gaps in experience that sympathy cannot. It is therefore less meaningful to empathize than to sympathize. Still, it is worth so much. Empathy allows us to find solutions to things that we see as problems. If we cannot empathize with that which we consider evil, we will never be able to address causes and will forever fight symptoms, dooming ourselves to fighting the same battles again and again.