Compassion vs. Empathy

Pranay Kotasthane and I co-authored a new version of the article that was published on Outlook.

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“If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.” – Oscar Wilde

When you get delivered stuff on a hell-hot day or amidst pouring rain, it’s difficult to not feel for the delivery workers. Likewise when we see child workers serving us at a roadside dhaba.

It can be argued that only the stone-hearted cannot feel empathy for them.

Yet, empathy is precisely what we must avoid if we’re keen to help them.

What’s the right emotion to feel then? Compassion.

In this article, Pranay Kotasthane makes a distinction between ‘empathy’ and ‘compassion’; words we use interchangeably.

“Empathy,” per him, “is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It involves stepping into someone else’s shoes and experiencing their emotional state as if it were one’s own.”

He contrasts it with ‘compassion’ that, according to him, “represents a more detached and rational concern for the general well-being of all people. It is rooted in a desire to alleviate suffering on a broader scale.”

Pranay’s explanation broadly overlaps with the Buddhist philosophy of ‘compassion’.

As Dalai Lama remarked: “Compassion is the desire for another to have freedom from suffering. Love is the desire for another to have happiness.”

To reiterate it my way:

• If a person’s pain evokes your fear of your own pain, it’s ‘empathy’.
• But if a person’s pain evokes a dispassionate yet earnest response, it’s ‘compassion’.

The distinction clarifies why marketers are required to have ‘customer empathy’, because ‘thinking from customer’s perspective’ is vital to find a common ground with customers, build relations and alliances.

Precisely this is also why policymakers must have ‘compassion’, they cannot allow a stakeholder’s pain to shape the response to an entire ecosystem’s problem.

In 1994, N. Rama Rao, the then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, banned alcohol in the state. The decision was positioned as Rao’s gift to the womenfolk, who were at the receiving end of alcohol-driven domestic violence. Indeed, if we look at the problem from this one angle alone, the solution that presents itself most naturally is an alcohol ban.

However, many second and third order effects are ignored when decisions are taken in the spur of empathy. As this report observes, this meant the immediate closure of 4 breweries and 43 distilleries, rendering 45,000 workers jobless. This was the visible part. The ban simply pushed the alcohol market underground. And, this only fattens the purse of anti-social elements who can now sell an inferior product at a premium. These inferior products might lead to health issues or even deaths of the menfolk, and therefore can cause graver injury to the women the ban seeks to protect. In 1997, the next Chief Minister, N Chandrababu Naidu had to revoke the ban claiming it was “not successful or feasible because of the leakages within the state and from across the borders“.

Nobody in the right mind would promote child labor. Yet, singular focus on ‘protecting’ children from labor without thinking through the consequences can make matters worse.

Talking about the impact of ban on child labor in Bangladesh, this article notes:

“Children were begging in the streets, engaging in prostitution and other crimes, or doing hard labor. The rapid expansion of the garment industry created better paid, less arduous jobs for children. Though far from ideal, those jobs were vastly superior to what the children had previously. And they were far better than what the kids were forced to return to when, as a result of pressure from the United States, the children were fired by the garment industry. The one place that they did not end up was in school. Thanks to U.S. pressure, many children went back to prostitution and other dangerous behavior.”

The author concludes: “ …[the] proposed U.S. legislation against the importation of textiles produced by child labor — to “protect” children from exploitation and promote their education — has had a devastating effect in Bangladesh, especially on the lives of those for whom it was designed to protect.”

Another reason why empathy is fatal in the policy world: when you intensely associate with a stakeholder’s pain, you automatically hate those whom the stakeholder judges as an “oppressor”.

In the instances cited above, hate directed towards menfolk fails to distinguish between men who drink to unwind and men who use the drunken state to inflict violence. Such hate prevents us from being able to separate good and bad working conditions for children.

The policy lens is now colored by both love and hate in a unilateral way. Something a policymaker must arguably avoid. Compassion requires you to rise above the dualities of victim and predator and look at the system that produces these classes.

Let’s conclude with another Dalai Lama’s quote: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”