Political Empathy For Dummies

If you can’t read this, maybe you need more empathy.

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Originally published on 7/23/25 at TheTorch.media.com.

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People on the left claim to care about the out-groups. People on the right claim to care about the in-groups.

Most of them don’t.

Of them, many care little about the success or plight of others. They’re simply practicing communal narcissism, or inflated self-importance resulting from an association with an institution or group, particularly one deemed by anyone as morally superior. This often overlaps with other virtue signaling.

Most of the rest, despite their best possible intentions, will still self-justify the centralization of state power and its abuse of force for their home team, even when there may be other solutions to our nation’s problems that, due to their uniparty programming, they refuse to entertain.

Thus:

Other people are just as important as me. Without them, I’m nothing.

In order to save myself, I have to save Springfield!

Or: to save ourselves and each other, we must save libertarianism. We must save the third, fourth, and fifth ways, and beyond. We must save the ability to view the world from myriad perspectives.

We must save empathy.

Fake libertarians will tell you that “empathy” is a dirty word. That it’s inherently collectivist and incompatible with liberty, that it is the direct cause of the use of government force.

But that’s not how Jesus saw it as he fed the hungry and set an example that inspired a man like the other JC – Jimmy Carter – to stay involved with Habitat for Humanity until his death a couple thousand years later, among other accomplishments. It’s not how Homer saw it as he risked his life to independently correct his mistake and save his town and the family he loved, despite his frequent lack of empathy for them.

It wasn’t someone else’s responsibility to make things better. It was theirs.

Real libertarians aren’t performative. We don’t get other people to do our bidding.

We show that we care about the rights of every individual with concrete action. We resist. We organize. We protest. We write. We empower. We don’t like our rights being threatened, and so we don’t like your rights being threatened, either.

We preserve human dignity. As a result, we lose a lot of elections for the right reasons instead of winning them for the wrong ones.

Because we understand that government threats against liberty are always against all of the People, and that the People must cooperate in solidarity rather than be divided and conquered in the most heavily propagandized nation in the world. We prioritize the individual, not the identitarianism that intersectional feminism, which is often-ironically perceived to be a left-wing paradigm, sought to overcome.

We see you.

We stand together and try to understand the stories of one another with the singular goal of ushering in and sustaining a libertarian future, pushed forward by countless unique voices in a choir of mutual respect.

We can’t do that without empathy.

Yet we are wary not to converge into the sacrificial oneness of unity and disrespect individuality.

Because empathy is knowing that the direct cause of government force is communal narcissism.