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Confucianism speaks of the importance of nourishing the sprouts of benevolence latent in us all, awaiting germination. The humanistic response to this conundrum is culture: a mechanism for cultivating one’s feelings and reactions to ethical fruition. But if feeling others’ pain as intensely as your own was a necessary condition for behaving ethically, then we would be in trouble. Perhaps some saints or particularly sensitive people are capable of attaining this bodhisattva-like ideal regularly. We simply don’t experience others’ existence viscerally, in our bones and blood, except on rare occasions where we truly commune with other people, usually friends, family, or lovers. Nonetheless, the problem of other minds remains questionable, unsettled. Nobody besides a clinically ill person suffering “solipsism syndrome” would treat the reality of others as up for debate. If asked point-blank, we’d pay lip service to the fact that others genuinely exist. We were supposed to have outgrown that stage of development long ago, in early toddlerhood. I’d like to think my numbness is a defense mechanism: that would be nobler. Rather than an escape from unfathomable pain, emotional imperturbability during a crisis might just be a manifestation of a failure of imagination, an empathetic defect. If we multiplied personal misfortunes a millionfold and experienced a loss in its totality-the horrific COVID statistics, the anxiety and agony that poverty and inequality force billions worldwide to endure, the wreckage of the Sixth Great Extinction and climate change-it would annihilate us entirely.īut it’s difficult to distinguish between the numbness that accompanies intense repression of trauma and the blankness of a simple, ignoble incapacity to react. Life is tough enough when we suffer personal calamities. It’s one thing to register a tragedy intellectually it’s another thing altogether to assimilate its emotional impact. Numbness can be a protective mechanism, a defense against situations that create too much pain for one consciousness to safely absorb. Am I a moral monster, a hypocrite of the first order? Or am I far from alone in grappling with this disquieting contradiction? Even speaking of these tragedies-poverty, economic inequality, racial injustice-I often feel hypocritical: my outrage feels feigned, my words uttered from an empty virtue-signaling reflex, not some wellspring of profound feeling. But I feel numb when I confront the immense death toll of COVID and the many large-scale tragedies I regularly bemoan, all the more so when-in the US at least-the delta variant is reserving the brunt of its brutality for those who have chosen to remain unvaccinated. Ethically, I believe that each person is worth a whole universe my politics are determined by my urge to avert the squandering of human potential. I suffer a vexing disconnect between my intellectual convictions and my emotional reactions.