Welcome to Your Superpower

Empathy is your superpower, but these are tough times, and the stakes are high. You've got to really fucking care.

We have all become extremely good at imagining what will destroy us. That can be really dangerous because the stories we tell tend to become true. So today I’m going to ask us to imagine beyond that; to imagine, also, what will save us. It comes down to one simple thing, pictured above.

Imagine The World Turned Against You

A friend works at NIH, and like tens of thousands of others, she has been told that she is likely to lose her job. Imagine you work for the NIH; imagine you have taken a job in public health because you want to make the world better more than you want to make a lot of money.

Imagine that you have to go into work every day now (in person, where there is no space for you), with the recognition that your employer wants you to suffer, wants you to despair. You don’t have to work too hard to imagine it, because it’s on the record, from Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, supervisor of all federal employees:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains…We want to put them in trauma.”

I promised you have a superpower that will save us, and now is the time to tap into it. Imagine how it feels to go into work every day, under those conditions.

Imagine that you spent your life in service to your country as a veteran, only to come home and find that the government is dismantling the VA.

Imagine that you gave up life in the private sector because you wanted to do pure research to cure Alzheimer’s, and your projects have all been cancelled.

Imagine that you are a forest ranger protecting public lands, or a doctor practicing public health at CDC, or a nurse providing medical care to children in rural communities in America and overseas.

Can you imagine that you have spent your life doing work for the public good because you care about the public good and now your employer says outright that they want to put you in trauma, and wants the world to see you as a villain?

Can you imagine that?

I hope so, because that is literally what is going to save us.

Imagine Everybody Cared

Imagine showing up for work at NIH, the first day you have been ordered into the office, even though there is nowhere for you to sit. Imagine that an oligarch who makes billions of dollars with federal funding for rockets that explode has decided you’re expendable, and is just waiting to tell you officially. Imagine that your entire career is falling apart and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Imagine that when you, and all your colleagues, show up at work that morning, the members of the All Souls’ Unitarian Church are at the metro station waiting for you. That’s them, above and below. Imagine what it would feel like, to walk out of the metro station to see those signs, to see people telling you, reminding you, you matter. We see you, and we care.

That is what is going to save us, that right there.

Our ability to imagine what it is like to be in their shoes, and to feel empathy for them, and to care.

How do you think humanity has made it this far in the first place?

Our Superpower Has Always Been Our Empathy

I’ve said before that stories are humanity’s superpower, and that is largely true. Of all the pilot versions of sapiens, homo sapiens were the only ones with a frontal cortex. We weren’t the smartest or the strongest, but we were the storytellers, and do you know what our stories allowed us to do?

Stories allowed us to imagine ourselves as other people, and specifically, stories made it possible for us to care.

When I tell you a story, in person or here on the page, our brain activities start to synchronize, a phenomenon called mirror neurons. It’s also known as the “as if phenomenon;” you respond as if that story is happening to you, creating a shared experience. If the story is effective, then it triggers a release of oxytocin, enhancing a sense of empathy and connection between us. And when I feel for you, and when you feel for me, then I will act to care for you, and you will act to care for me.

And this is our superpower. Stories aren’t our superpower. They are the force that unleashes our true superpower: empathy.

Our ability to care for people who are not related to us; to learn from people we have never met; to act on behalf of generations who don’t even yet exist; our ability to care for other species, other tribes, other communities, this is our superpower.

Empathy is our superpower. It is the reason we have always risen to the challenge: because, ultimately, we care for each other. You see it even now, in the way we rose to help Western North Carolina and California, in floods and fires.

Most animals will protect their own offspring, their own tribe, their own species. But humanity’s unprecedented superpower is our ability to care not only for our own kin, or our own tribe, or our own species, but for the good of all. We have yet to identify another form of life on this planet that has the ability to act in the best interest of life that does not yet exist. (I say this, but I also suspect that trees might have things going on that we don’t know about.)

What made us special, in the eyes of God and in the structures of our brain, from the very beginning, is our ability to care. To care for people who don’t look like us, or think like us. To care for people we will never meet, for people who aren’t yet born.

But empathy? Empathy is our superpower.

Empathy is like solar power: it is an endlessly renewable resource, and the more of it you use, the more of it you create.

Empathy is the one thing that human beings can offer that artificial intelligence never will.

Storytelling is our superpower because stories unleash our empathy, stories supercharge our ability to care for each other.

But right now we are in danger of losing our superpower, because we are using our stories not to care — but to show contempt.

When We Lose Our Empathy, We Lose It All

Here’s where Elon Musk is right: empathy is the fundamental weakness of his vision for Western civilization. Because in his vision, only the strong survive, the resources are concentrated in the hands of a very few extremely powerful (white) men. And the only thing that will keep his vision from coming true?

If enough people care.

Contempt and apathy is their ally; empathy is their adversary. The stories they tell serve not to unleash our empathy, but to unleash our anger. The stories they tell serve not to bring us together, but to tear us apart.

People who believe no one cares start to long for a past world, when perhaps they felt more connected and loved. People who believe no one cares will go to extreme lengths to feel less alone. They will make terrible choices in their life and in the ballot booth, because of their fear, and their anger, and their loneliness.

It is, I believe, the battle for our souls right now. The battle between those who want us to stop caring, and those of us who recognize that only in caring can we be saved.

And if you’re going to ask me what is the greatest threat to our survival, it’s very simple.

Caring is our superpower.

And when we stop caring, we start dying.

In his book Outraged!, Kurt Gray talked about the deep divisions running through our culture right now, the stories that are tearing us apart. He writes that a major driver of conflict is dehumanization: we see the person opposite us as not a “real” person. I would argue that most of the cruelty of humanity stems from a lack of empathy: because we fail to see people who do not look like us or think like us or live like us as people who matter just like us.

“Seeing the other side as less than human — as irrational and invulnerable — licenses cruelty towards them. The best way to make each other seem fully human is by telling stories of harm.” — Kurt Gray, Outraged!

When we fight with people, we stop thinking of them as people, we stop caring for them. We start mocking them, demonizing them, villainizing them.

Do you care about the young man living in a small town where there are so few jobs, addiction is spiraling, and deaths of despair have never been higher?

Or do you care about the trans kid, uncertain of where or whether they belong in the world, and whether or not they are loved for who they are?

Do you care about the child who is not yet born, or the woman who is struggling to survive?

Do you care about the Jewish people who literally carry the trauma of the Holocaust imprinted on their DNA, or do you care about the innocent civilians in Gaza being eradicated due to a war they never chose?

The superpower of humanity has always been our ability to care for them all.

So, Dr. Gray says, what we must do, to start to heal, to reverse the division, is simple. We’ve got to show each other that we care, and the way to do that is very simple.

We share our stories of suffering, and we listen, and we care.

Ferocious Empathy: You’ve Got To Really Fucking Care

Storytelling is a competitive sport, and may the best story win, and these are the two competing stories at work right now.

If our adversary is our contempt and disregard for people who are not like us, our cruelty and blindness to the suffering of others, then what is called for is ferocious empathy.

Practice that sort of ferocious empathy, as I’ve decided to call it, because that is our superpower.

There are a few rotten billionaires in the world, but there are billions of us, and you know what we can do that they never will?

As human beings in a world that seems to have long since stopped giving a shit about us, we have the infinite capacity to care.

We can care.

We can care ferociously.

Cory Booker showed us what it looks like, to care. I think the reason he roused such an incredible response is because finally he showed us what we’ve all been longing for: he showed us that someone is listening to our stories of suffering, and they care.

That is why people are showing up at town halls, wanting to share their stories. It is why we are showing up on Saturday, and I anticipate that I will feel immense power and energy and joy when I see how many millions of people care right along with me.

You might feel helpless, but let me assure you, you are infinitely powerful. You have the infinite ability to care. You can care ferociously, you can fight like hell for what you care about.

That is your superpower. That is your purpose.

That is what is going to save us all.

Imagine what it’s like, to be someone who’s suffering.

Imagine their life, and decide to ferociously care.

And Saturday, and next week, and after that? We’ll take it from there.