Morality and Empathy

[game_byrd]

I was doing some "research" this morning on Peter Petrelli and what makes him such a nice guy. Where does a person's empathy come from? Why do they feel it? Is it selective? What other emotions are commonly paired with empathy?

I came across this TEDtalk: Paul Zak: Trust, morality and oxycotin. It starts slow, but is very good. Oxycotin creates

Comments

[game_byrd]

Yes, it allows me to be more certain that he was abused as a child and/or early teen. I've been part of discussions about the nature of his childhood. What we see in canon is proof that Virginia was rather weird, judgmental and perhaps unstable, but those traits don't guarantee child abuse. His lack of empathy is there from the start in canon; actually he gets *more* empathetic as the series goes on.

I can't imagine that he was in a high stress position as a watchmaker, working alone in a profession that's not very dangerous. He might have had financial pressures, but he wasn't trying to support a family on a salary that was too small, his relatives weren't suffering from terminal illnesses, he wasn't fighting with a lover, etc.

Testosterone? Maybe. But the main thing that seems likely is abuse. He's male, large and fit, which makes it unlikely it was a lover. His mother seems somewhat deranged and his father was absent, which makes it much more likely.

So what this little film helped me nail down was that the answer for 'Was Gabriel abused as a child?' goes from 'probably' to 'yes'.

On Peter, it also helped me nail down that empathy is not a stand-alone trait. It automatically appears with trust, generosity, caring and loving. You do not get empathy without incurring those other traits.

xxx

My job is not now as bad as it was six months ago (and for a year before that), when it was so bad I had trouble sleeping and was having flare-ups of irritable bowel syndrome. I had insufficient resources to do the job assigned to me and if I failed on key portions of that job, then 5-20 people would be out of work for 1-10 days. They would be sent home without pay and it would be all my fault. Most people who work production jobs don't have the finances to handle a sudden lack of pay for an entire week. Plus, for such an incident, I was almost sure to be fired, with all that would mean for my own family and precarious situation in the ongoing divorce.

I asked for help repeatedly and was repeatedly told more resources weren't in the budget, or that various predecessors had been able to handle it alone (two points: 1) there have been 12 managers in my role in the company in the 8 years before I arrived - they burn through them; 2) we've **tripled** our business in the last two years without an increase in staff).

About eight months ago, they finally let me add an expediter to the staff whose job was to call suppliers and follow up on late deliveries, as well as the ubiquitous "other tasks as assigned". She's been a godsend. Once she got trained up, our on-time delivery from suppliers rose from 35% to 85%. Increased on-time delivery means the production managers can more efficiently allocate workers to projects because the parts will be there to work on, and of course a huge burden off my mind is that the odds of a production line shutdown (which is where people go home without pay) goes down.

It's building back up though, as we've managed to land two new accounts in the last month and they're working on a third, so the workload is still increasing. The last couple weeks have been hectic and usually the end of the year is easy. Maybe I can point to the big turnaround over the summer from adding the expediter and convince them that if they want performance, they have to get new performers and not just keep adding work to the existing ones.