Weaponized Empathy Relies on Narcissistic Guilt

How a warped sense of guilt is exploited by those who control the narrative

One of the most common tactics employed by politicians, shady charities, slanted news purveyors and, unfortunately, close acquaintances and family, is the use of an empathic response to get some desired result from others. Some clear examples would include the use of imagery depicting starving children on TV, videos of people being roughly restrained by police, stories about migrants being whipped by border patrol agents, a personal tale of woe and so on.

Using empathy to manipulate people is particularly effective because empathy is involuntary. Use the right trigger and it's pretty much guaranteed to arise in normal people. Most people cannot, for example, avoid wincing when they see someone get hit in the face, nor can they avoid feeling empathy when they see a sick child. Beggars straightforwardly use empathy to solicit handouts, often without making any attempt to conceal their manipulative intent. They don't bother to hide the manipulation because empathy is a primary emotion, and the goal isn't to fool anyone, but rather to provoke a response. And it works.

In late 1997 I went to Hong Kong to obtain a PRC visa, then bought a train ticket to Beijing. The trip started in Shenzhen, just outside Hong Kong, and was scheduled for the following morning, so I booked a hotel near the train station and decided to have a look around Shenzhen. Walking around the vicinity of the train station I noticed a large number of beggars. There were two categories that stood out: legless old men and children carrying babies. The old men all had their legs amputated at the knee and were lying on their bellies with one arm extended with a cup for handouts. It struck me as strange that so many men would have the exact same amputations and be begging in one area, all in the same manner. Likewise the children with babies all looked pretty much the same, and on closer inspection the babies were clearly drugged with something to keep them sleeping.

It was immediately clear to me that the begging was an organized enterprise, and there was no serious attempt to hide this. But that didn't matter, because when I saw the babies up close and personal it affected me anyway. Almost involuntarily, I gave one of the kids carrying a baby a few kuai (Chinese money), and instantly regretted it as I immediately got swarmed by children trying to reach into my pockets for whatever they could grab. Mercifully, a Chinese passerby shooed them away and I beat a retreat back to the hotel with mixed emotions of pity and indignation.

Although it took me a while to wrap my head around it, I eventually realized that despite my revulsion over the beggar gangs, their method was effective. It was the emotional equivalent of mugging people.

In the US we wouldn't allow such gangs to operate on the streets, but the equivalent is prominent over the airwaves, the Internet and in print media. We are routinely emotionally assaulted by imagery and language designed to evoke feelings of empathy that will prompt some desired response from us.

In almost all cases the response they are aiming for is not actual compassion, but instead some form of avoidance. By using involuntary empathic responses to provoke negative feelings, they trigger secondary emotions such as guilt and pity, which are themselves uncomfortable. To assuage guilt or pity, we comply with what we perceive to be the object's demands, much as we would hand over a wallet to an armed robber to make him put away the gun and leave.

This tactic is routinely exploited on a massive scale in the West. The most classic example I can think of is the photo of the dead Syrian child washed up on a Turkish beach during the 2015 population transfer into Europe. The photo was splashed all over the press and used to evoke guilt throughout Europe, prompting compliance with the elite-engineered mass influx of Middle Eastern migrants.

The video of the restraint and subsequent death of George Floyd was another example of weaponization of empathy, prompting compliance with Black Lives Matter's agenda.

Over and over again we are confronted with these images, videos and stories, and we still haven't developed an adaptive response. We are a society that is routinely manipulated into acting against our best interests through the manipulation of our empathy.

So what's going on here? Why are Western peoples uniquely susceptible to this sort of manipulation? First, we should be clear that it isn't the involuntary empathy that prompts compliance, but instead the secondary feeling of guilt, which is the necessary ingredient here. But is guilt inevitable? From a quick survey of non-Western cultures - and the premodern West - it is not.

Attempting to manipulate Chinese or Russians into acting against their personal interests in this manner would fail. In China appeals to karma are effective, while in Russia Christian charity might do the trick, but neither culture would necessarily feel any guilt when confronted with scenarios designed to evoke empathy. As humans they would feel empathy, and presumably sympathy as well, but the guilt necessary to effect compliance simply wouldn't be there. Likewise, in old, Christian Europe, nobody would feel guilt over matters outside of their personal influence. And that is the key: the very concept of guilt has, for secular Westerners, taken on an entirely different character.

The traditional Christian concept of guilt is about one's personal adherence to social and religious mandates. Guilt is a matter of failure to live up to your responsibilities. We are all expected to do our part and follow the rules, and if we do not we are guilty. However, if another person fails to do their part, we do not incur guilt. It is all about free choice. Where there is no choice, there is no guilt. This doesn't mean that it cannot be a heavy burden; guilt places a big responsibility on the individual. You cannot escape what you have done by shifting the blame onto others.

However, in modern society the old concept of guilt has been eroding for some time, particularly in the postwar era. It started with blank-slate ideas that we are all purely products of our experiences. How can someone be held responsible for a crime if he was socialized into criminal behavior? This was then accompanied by the rise of moral relativism, in which an objective moral standard is rejected in favor of circumstantial standards.

Eventually, people began to internalize these ideas, where they modified the concept of guilt, which is very much a matter of internal values. The idea of guilt remained, but for many it was modified so as to be externalized. This allows for the avoidance of personal guilt in favor of some exterior explanation, i.e. "I raped and murdered that woman because I was a victim of child abuse."

This new form of guilt, which allows people to evade personal responsibilities for their actions, is essentially part and parcel of the narcissistic personality wherein the self is imagined as essentially flawless and never at fault for anything. I think it could be accurately termed "narcissistic guilt," so I'll refer to it in that manner henceforth.

Narcissistic guilt now stands as the default form of guilt for large swaths of the West. One might assume that it absolves its holders from personal requirements, but this is not the case. Instead of demanding personal acceptance of responsibility and repentance, it requires performative display, consensus joining and participation in social rituals of expiation. Importantly, it requires the near constant shifting of any personal feelings of guilt onto external events and narratives. Thus feeling guilt over black slavery in 19th century antebellum America absolves one from guilt over, say, fornicating with your friend's boyfriend, cheating on a test, callously supporting policies that harm and disenfranchise your American neighbors, etc. The thing about slavery is that you, personally, had no choice in the matter; transferring guilt to this sort of thing removes the burden of responsibility traditional guilt imposes on one's choices.

Narcissistic guilt is a bonanza for opinion makers and politicians of all sort. The ability to mass mobilize guilt for pretty much anything, even if it doesn't involve the actual responsibilities of one's supporters is a powerful tool. Want to import 20 million dependents and garrison them in your power centers? Just show a picture of a dead kid somewhere and you get instant compliance. Want to suppress resistance to political riots? Cherry pick a video of a cop manhandling a criminal of the appropriate demographic and play it on a loop.

In a healthy society, we'd see a picture of a child who drowned halfway around the world and feel empathy and sympathy, but not guilt, because we didn't put that kid in a leaky boat in the dead of night in an attempt to illegally enter another country. On the other hand, a lot more of us might feel guilty about reaping investment windfalls on assets while depriving millions of our fellow citizens of decent jobs by sending them overseas.

Narcissistic guilt is fundamentally a boon to elites, as it promises people freedom even as it removes their moral agency, transferring it to those who wield the narratives. For the rest of us, it makes us not only the tools of others, but lousier people as well. If you feel guilty for what you did not do, but not for what you did, it's easy to behave in a sociopathic manner.

So it's apparent that to combat weaponized empathy and restore personal accountability we must, as individuals and a society, reject narcissistic guilt and regain a sense of individual responsibility for individual choices and actions. Conceptually I think this is fairly easy to understand, and it has personal benefits as well. Not only will we be less prone to manipulation, but we'll be better to each other as well and the benefits of that will extend throughout society.