.....I ended up writing a 6000+ words of essay in response, but promptly deleted it because I cringed at myself.
Anywho, rather than making my case for why money is better than empathy (something my father has been trying to teach me since childhood, and yet I never actually learned or agreed with it until in my late-20s when I was struggling to make ends-meet), I'll instead try to address the crux of your belief -- empathy as a virtue.
(That said, before I do, I need to reiterate that money isn't better than empathy just because it helps in your survival, but also because of other variables involved with money, such as not only the things you get with money, but also the reason why you get money in the first place. I made a very long case for it in my draft, but.... it's way too long for me to bother finish writing it, lmao. But anywho, it's worth realizing that Euro-centric perspectives tend to be very limited on this matter, and it's worth broadening one's horizon beyond all the "money bad" and "capitalism vs socialism" crap we're inundated with, because American / European / Russian values don't tell you 100% how reality works.)
Before anything, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1zZ_eKSAAI If I had a penny for every time I've met people who preached Empathy like they're introducing me to the Second-Coming of Jesus, but eventually end up acting far more toxic than anybody else you've met (often to a sociopathic and even murderous degree, leading me to nigerundayo), I'd... probably be able to buy a good laptop by now, because the power-outages in my area are ridiculous. Hell, I've seen these Priests of Empathy being, at best, indifferent towards and, at worst, actively making a case for genocide against my race, and they honestly believed they were being good, moral people who care for other people.
There are a lot of reasons for this: Perhaps the preachers themselves don't understand what empathy is and how it works, or if they're masquarading their own toxic nature behind a veil of faux-goodness, or that they don't realize the catastrophic consequences of excessive empathy due to human limitations, or (speaking of human limitations) they assume that biases don't come naturally, etc.
But I think there's something more fundamental than that.
Firstly, I think it's important to understand that Empathy cannot, and should not, be a moral virtue -- rather, it's Compassion that fits the bill instead (regardless of your level of empathy). Empathy is less of a moral discipline and more of a natural emotional sensation, much like intuition, and it informs you about something so that you can cater your behavior accordingly; it's a morally-neutral utility, and even then its role is largely overstated.
In fact, there are multiple types of empathy, each with their pros and cons, but the two most important ones due to their stark distinctions being
Emotional Empathy and
Cognitive Empathy. When people talk about empathy, they usually mean
Emotional Empathy for its low-effort high-feeling nature (because for some reason people ascribe morality with emotions these days), despite the fact that Emotional Empathy also creates backdoor vulnerabilities to your own being, leaving you susceptible to psychological manipulations, and thus making you do and believe things you otherwise, rationally, wouldn't. And it's generally adherents to this sort of empathy would categorize people actively practicing Cognitive Empathy as downright apathetic (and thus "sinful") -- even though, ironically, in most cases if not all, Cognitive Empathy will help you decide on an optimal moral choice.
Empathy cannot be a virtue, because it is a sensation, a means to figure out what your actual moral actions should be. If carefully assessed, it will help guide you to different moral actions depending on context, showing Compassion being one of them, but it isn't even
necessary for people to be moral. If you hold Empathy as a virtue, then you're shifting people's worth to what they
are and not what they
do. That can be dangerous, leading to innocents being ostracised or crucified even if they don't deserve it. This is the kind of thing that leads to shit like Cancel Culture (I'll explain in a bit).
It's really important to understand that human beings are flawed creatures -- we have terrible memory for our own standards, we're consciously limited, our biology and circumstances affect our mood often, our attention-span is shrinking, we get drowsy at afternoon despite a lot of pending work, we get bored reading my novella-length posts, we get easily indoctrinated by ideologies and propaganda, we're fragile enough to die at a mere push by somebody, we lose hope when we hope when our means income is gone, etc. So it's kind of unrealistic to assume that we can somehow overcome our all our biases at a drop of a hat every day and always be optimal in our actions -- because if we were, we'd all not only be Jeff Bezos but would also have managed to create a colony in Neptune by now.
Even when we manage to painstakingly get past one bias, new biases crop up all the time in our own psyche when life throws new lemons at us. That's because of the nature of biases, and our minds, in general. We generalize when we don't know, and it isn't inherently a bad thing (which I explained in my previously now-deleted post, but I'll leave it hanging here), because heuristics is the fastest way for an individual to familiarize himself with any situation, and as we get more and more familiar with something we start to discriminate (not the conventionally misused word, but its original meaning -- that is, making distinctions). For example, for any non-tech person every screw-driver might look the same, but it's only when they start working hands-on that they start discriminating between screwdrivers depending on what screws they're optimally used for; yet, they couldn't have even gotten to the point so fast if they didn't generalize that
screwdrivers lt you screw in screws. If you couldn't generalize, and you needed to fix electronics, well, you'd be
screwed.
Generalization is great, because it allows you to get you up to speed on shit. It also functions as a survival mechanism. Sure, it isn't a virtue, but it is a default human response, and anybody that says that you
shouldn't generalize or that
they don't generalize are lying to you. For example, if you have enough disposable income, you find yourself wanting to help poor people, because you generalize that all poor people must be suffering the same way -- you either just go with the generalization by throwing money at them, or you discriminate between them to understand
how you could optimally help them each individual poor person depending on their own unique circumstances. The only cure to generalization is understanding things, not avoiding generalization itself.
I point this out because the same limitations and penchant for heuristics apply to empathy too. Even if you're some kind of a natural empath (and natural "empaths" have their own baggage of problems they wish they didn't have, trust me on this), you'd still be unable to empathize with everyone you come across. Because your understanding of their circumstances can just never match their reality (maybe sentiments, sometimes, but never their reality). And this is one of the many leading factors behind why "empathetic" people end up being so vicious towards other people: Even if they actively try, they can seldom understand where the other person is truly coming from, and if there's a mismatch between their model of generalization in their heads and the existence of another person, this "empathetic" person will find that other person to be a cold and uncomfortable existence, and the empath will find himself being potentially violent where it isn't justified.
Autists make a great example here. Most people sympathize (but not empathize) and are compassionate towards autists... provided they KNOW that they're autistic. But when it isn't known that a person is autistic, because of the mismatch between the model-of-minds and our inability to properly empathize with an autistic person, people make terrible assumptions about them (case no# 9000+ of "don't-generalize" people actively generalizing here) and treat them very terribly. I mean, the empaths are being empathetic, so
they can't be in the wrong, so it must be the
other guy, right? I picked autists here, but this world is filled with different people from different circumstances, and it's kind of arrogant to assume that you can somehow empathize with all of them, considering we can't even comprehend what most of them are going through.
(Hell... not to sound like an edgelord, but... even the biggest self-proclaimed empaths failed to empathize with
me throughout my life, and they failed spectacularly even if I was doing my best to make it easy for them, which is what made me want to go and understand why this happens. No, I'm not wallowing in self-pity here, lol, because I know a lot of people are in the same situation as me, and despite lack of empathy towards me I'm not really having it THAT bad in life. If people have ever been nice to me or respected to me, I know for certain it isn't because of empathy, but rather other factors, like respect, or pleasant associations, etc. and that's generally enough. The people most vicious towards me were often the empathetic bunch, and the ones nicest towards me were just... normal, or sometimes even autistic, or clients, I guess? Hence why I said empathy is overrated.)
Long story short, we just can't empathize with everybody. We can't pretend to even
know what they're actually going through.
But that doesn't stop us from benig moral actors, and localize our vision to optimize our behaviour. As I said, rational compassion goes a long way to make people's lives better, even if empathy isn't involved.
For example: I was leading a team of junior 3D artists and animators in my previous company, and I honestly CAN'T empathize with all of them. But I do know they're good people, and they respected me as much as I respected them, and I can generalize that this pandemic may have put them in a terrible situation just as with anybody else. You know one of the biggest reasons why I value money more than empathy? It's because I know that, even without my empathy, if I have enough money I can help them out by giving them small jobs to do for me (scaling up my own projects, basically), solving both my problem and theirs. Is it selfish? Yeah, because I need cheap labour. But I think even they'd much rather have money in their pockets right now rather than somebody waxing poetry about how much they feel their pain. (Hell, I want to even hire FaustWolf for a story, but I don't have any money on me -- and I don't even know what he's up to or how he's doing right now, so I can definitely say that my compassion comes from my
selfishness, not
empathy, and even then it benefits everyone.)
Sorry if you had to read this stupidly long shit, so I'd like to close this post with one more thing:
Honestly, the moment I
dropped having to be empathetic, and instead focusing on developing strict moral princples and debating with myself on what is right and wrong, that I found myself being a better (and more stable) person overall. Focusing on empathy made me feel like I was doing
something righteous, but somewhere in my heart I knew it wasn't the most optimal moral action, and when I reflected upon it I realized that what I was actually feeling was sanctimonious catharsis, which have little to no bearing long-term. That, and the fact that my family is still in poverty and I've done nothing to elevate them out of it, was a major wake-up call for me that no amount of self-righteousness can really make me a moral individual. That I can't be moral if I'm not responsible, and I can't take responsibility for other people if I can't even take my own family's responsibility on my own shoulders. (Besides, me learning this so late in my life should teach me to pay more attention to my own Hindu heritage -- because Hinduism teaches you the value of Duty above all else, and I would have probably been a far better person today if I actually paid attention to hindu philosophy intellectually rather than dismissing it.)
Interestingly, what I learned back then was the same thing that an anime this year echoed back to me -- season 2 of "Ascendance of a Bookworm" -- where a Priest tells the protagonist that if she can't or isn't willing to take responsibility for other people's lives, she has no right to possess self-righteous indignation towards anybody else. Just because of that, I will always hold this anime in high regards. Besides, AoaB places a lot of value on money, so there's that too. .....In fact, it probably would have been more entertaining for you to watch that anime rather than read my uninteresting post, because it explains everything I've just said better than I can, well, minus the empathy bit.
