So, in researching this current art project, I came across an interesting thing: we all scale our perceptions to our own experience. We joke about first world problems, but that’s the thing; for the person who is screaming about how he didn’t get his appetizer as fast as he wanted, or, gee, I dunno, who whined about liking beer in front of Congress, or who maybe killed people because they had nicer business cards than him, those things ARE the worst things ever to happen, because they’re the worst things to happen TO THEM. They’d rate that ten out of ten on their scale, because that’s how they tare their scale.

The depth of feeling is the same as it would be for, say, Katrina survivors - the worst thing is the worst thing. The problem is how many people lack the basic capability to go “oh, not getting a 7 pm table at Prego’s is not the same as having cancer.” Or “Being told you can’t graze your herd on public land for free for years is not the same as systematic racial discrimination over three hundred years.” It doesn’t work any more than that thing we heard way back when about how we should clean our plates because there are starving children in Africa worked. 

The problem is that empathy, or even the ability to recognize that your scale of suffering might not line up with someone else’s, can’t be legislated, it can’t be forced on people. It’s actually somewhere in the physical brain. We evolved to have empathy, and it’s clear that not everybody got it in the kit.  Hell, maybe human society needs the occasional bastard to function, I dunno.  

But the key thing here is that appealing to a lot of people in power’s empathy is not going to work. They will think that because the worst thing ever was the time their frat bros have them a wedgie and they got through that all right, then everybody else’s worst problem can be gotten through just as easily. 

Facts don’t matter because their scale has been tared to a region of human experience where person-to-person interactions are all that matter.  If you’ve never had an experience where the world disagreed with you and you couldn’t tell it “No, there ISN’T a fire burning my house down”, then you have no way to deal with someone ELSE telling you that if you have a gasoline-and-sparklers party in your living room, bad things might happen. 

This is why I think a fair number of anti discrimination activists are attacking the problem where it can’t be hurt. Reason doesn’t work on the people whose scales are set to a region where feelings got hurt. Fairness doesn’t apply to people who haven’t ever experienced unfairness. 

What would work? I dunno. But if somebody thinks that being late for a dinner party is the same as having your children taken away and lost in the system forever, and can’t imagine there’s a difference between them, then you gotta try another way to solve the problem.