Empaths, Sociopaths, and Why America's Divide Isn't About Politics Anymore

Photo by Zahra Amiri on Unsplash

This is not about politics.

I wish it were, though, as that would be relatively easy to navigate.

We are not a nation, as we’ve often thought, simply positioned on either side of the aisle working to craft reasonable, good-faith compromise somewhere in the humane middle. Sadly, that ship left the port a long time ago. (Or maybe, it descended a gold escalator.)

The prevailing narrative of the last decade is that America has been fractured by political ideologies, bunkered down in disagreement on what path will most serve the common good. This is a dangerous fiction we need to discard once and for all.

The dividing lines in America have nothing to do with party affiliation anymore.

Just open up your phone, eavesdrop at the checkout line, or talk to your neighbor, and you’ll see the lines along which we now find ourselves:

One side celebrates people being abducted from the street without due process or just cause.

One side rejoices in strangers having food taken away from them without knowing a single one of their stories.

One side applauds the bombing of boats in foreign waters with zero knowledge of who is killed.

One side blindly despises people for their gender identity, despite that having no impact on their lives whatsoever.

One side reduces an entire population to terrorists and drug dealers to justify their swift eradication.

One side conflates American with righteous and whiteness with goodness.

One side excuses pardons for drug runners.

It defends the protection of pedophiles.

It steadfastly worships a felonious, treasonous rapist.

And none of this is about politics; it’s about when faced with the suffering and injustice in our path, whether we will default to compassion or to cruelty.

America’s present divide reveals the orientation of hearts as we move through the world, the story we tell ourselves about other people, and what we want our lives to be marked by.

Will we be bleeding heart empaths who err on the side of love toward all our neighbors, or callous, fuck your feelings sociopaths who rejoice in the pain of others because we’ve dehumanized them to the point that their lives are worthless to us?

Will we see empathy as our highest calling as human beings, or as a character flaw needing to be discarded?

One of the greatest lies we’re asked to accept as gospel is that all opinions are valid, that every position is somehow equally worthy of merit and deserving of consideration. We’re often led to believe that in every situation where an impasse is reached, the most humane response is to “agree to disagree”.

It is not a requirement of tolerant people to tolerate everything equally. Our patience, understanding, and forbearance are not infinite. There are limits.

We can be open to hearing someone’s story and, once we have listened to it, conclude that something in that story has yielded a position too hateful or violent to bear.

We can be accepting of a wide swath of worldviews and belief systems and attitudes, while declaring some of them a bridge too far for us to share space with or have relational proximity to.

We can be really good listeners and eventually decide that what we have heard is fully abhorrent and not within the acceptable parameters of our morality.

Saying that we believe in diversity does not come with the expectation that we will object to nothing and that we will accept everything—actually, it’s quite the opposite.
Precisely because disparate humanity is of such importance to us, we can and should conclude that certain beliefs, legislation, movements, and people are antithetical to life; that they are adversarial to that humanity:

Yes, countless perspectives on international conflicts, gun legislation, government spending, or environmental dangers fall within the confines of what tolerance will accommodate and what responsible debate will hold, but not all of them.

We can disagree on all sorts of issues without that disagreement being a deal breaker, but there are some things that, as people of faith, morality, and conscience, we simply will not allow—and these things transcend politics.

The days ahead are going to require us to dig beneath the surface skirmishes and into the bedrock of what’s really happening here so that we don’t waste a second fighting fruitless battles that miss the point entirely.

Refuse to be gaslighted and guilted for allowing politics to get in the way of your relationships because that’s not what’s happening here.

It’s time we stopped pretending that our current national crisis is political, as that only serves to distract us from the far more worrisome truth that we need to reckon with:

We’re not politically divided; we are morally fractured.

No election result will change that.

The question is, what will?

Do you agree or disagree that the divides here are beyond politics? What do you see as that path forward for our nation and for each of us who call it home? Let me know in the comments.