Reflexive non-sympathy

I’ve been thinking lately about an attitude you could call reflexive non-sympathy. It’s the attitude that some people seem to feel compelled to exhibit whenever they hear of someone who has had some sort of trouble that is in part or wholly due to that person’s own rotten choices. For example, when they hear of an obese person who loses a leg to diabetes, they immediately respond, “No sympathy here. He ate himself into poor health (and I resent paying his medical bills).” Or if they read about a drunk driver involved in a car accident, their first comment is, “Well, he deserved it. I’m just glad no innocent people were killed by that moron.” These kind of automatic responses are common - I've certainly said stuff like this myself, often enough.


If someone suggests that it’s possible to have even a modicum of sympathy for people who do bad things and make poor choices, the reflexive non-sympathizer is often enraged, as though the sympathizer is trying to convince people that obesity is a good thing or that drunk driving should be winked at.

Really, why should it be so hard to think that many people make very, very poor decisions and do really rotten things and nevertheless are not totally undeserving of some sympathy? It’s not as though this is an either/or situation, where you have to side one way or the other. If you can understand how some people, due to a likely complex set of circumstances, may have become obese, or alcoholics, or drug addicts, or debtors, or just general screw-ups, that doesn’t mean you think that obesity, alcoholism, drug addiction, bad spending habits, or stupidity are good things. It doesn’t mean you think they should escape the consequences of their actions, or that they should be celebrated as poor, poor victims. It just means that you can see how the situation might be a little more complex than “What an idiot. Off with his head!”

I can think of four reasons behind the barking of the reflexive non-sympathizer. 1) He or she believes in the value of stigma, and fears that showing any shred of sympathy for people who fail may weaken society (if we show any sympathy for compulsive gamblers, everyone will want to gamble); 2) he or she cannot imagine personally being so weak as to fail in these ways, yet even the thought of being so weak is terrifying and must be defended against, publically and immediately; 3) he or she may have been personally traumatized by someone who has done this bad thing, and desire others to hate and punish everyone who does these bad things; 3) he or she is hopeful that somehow life will be fair if a position of stern personal goodness is maintained (I don’t overeat or use drugs or abuse alcohol or spend irresponsibly or engage in immoral activity or treat people badly, so I will be OK. Bad things can and should happen to people who do all those bad things, but I should be safe.)

I’m also mystified a bit at the reflexive non-sympathizer’s sense that sympathy can be wasted – as though it is a tangible commodity, limited in supply, and that “spending” this commodity on the undeserving will somehow result in there being less of it available for the deserving. This seems almost like magical thinking – not least because it seems to assume that the undeserving will mystically benefit from sympathy felt by an unknown person.

The reflexive non-sympathizer reminds me of the student who doesn’t see the point of reading literature. I came across these students quite regularly. Their attitude was something like, “Why would I want to read about a loser like MacBeth, or Madame Bovary, or Raskolnikov, or Jay Gatsby? They are idiots who made a hash of their lives and deserved what they got.” Some students didn’t seem able to grasp the concept that it is quite possible to think that all the great losers of literature are not being held up as role models to emulate, but as case studies in understanding the human psyche – and that you can condemn their decisions and actions and yet also feel some sympathy for them when you understand how they came to be the type of person who does those bad things.

But, no. For them it just has to be X is bad, therefore anyone who does X is a bad person. No sympathy. End of story. Nothing to learn here. (Or anywhere, I fear.)