We need everyone to read more books. A wide variety of stories on a wide variety of topics by a wide variety of authors, all with different backgrounds and ideas. We must read stories that let us temporarily step into the mind and experiences of other people, who aren’t us, to train our brains the ability to understand the plights of others. Books of human stories, as opposed to movies, doom-scrolling TikTok, etc., seems uniquely suited for this kind of training of empathy, because the stories are executed inside our own brains.
I’m willing to bet that these why-are-the-leopards-suddenly-eating-my-face? the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion type people have read distinctly less, or at least far less varied, stories than us who look at them and wonder how it is possible to be so unable to put themselves in the shoes of anyone but themselves.
Reading.
We need everyone to read more books. A wide variety of stories on a wide variety of topics by a wide variety of authors, all with different backgrounds and ideas. We must read stories that let us temporarily step into the mind and experiences of other people, who aren’t us, to train our brains the ability to understand the plights of others. Books of human stories, as opposed to movies, doom-scrolling TikTok, etc., seems uniquely suited for this kind of training of empathy, because the stories are executed inside our own brains.
I’m willing to bet that these why-are-the-leopards-suddenly-eating-my-face? the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion type people have read distinctly less, or at least far less varied, stories than us who look at them and wonder how it is possible to be so unable to put themselves in the shoes of anyone but themselves.