Hey everybody, in this video I'm gonna talk about a twitter thread that I think is just incredibly interesting But before we get into it, three disclaimers First, even though the tweets I'm talking about have gotten a lot of attention The person behind them is not famous And while I do have some choice and passionate words for those tweets, and do think there's important things to talk about here I hope you don't take this as an opportunity to get mad at, and bully this random dude Second, the art for this video is provided by the lovely Mothcub She's an artist on the internet and you can check out her YouTube channel if you want to Third, content warning ['boop' noises] And with that let's get started Part 1: the badness of the tweets. So I won't keep you in suspense Let's just read this juicy Twitter thread together 30 years ago a man walked into a university in Montreal and murdered 14 women in what he called a fight against feminism He entered a classroom and told the male students to leave so he could kill the women Instead of teaming up and fighting the shooter, all of the men left It is easy to criticize when you aren't in the situation yourself but.. according to reports, in this classroom, there were approximately 50 men, including a professor, and only nine women Fifty! and not one of these men took it upon himself to stand up for these women. 30 years later and some men still scoff at the mere idea of being a feminist or of caring about women's issues What if more men cared what if more men viewed women as their equals as fellow humans instead of viewing them as disposable as lesser as other. While this Massacre speaks to the dangers of misogyny It also speaks to the general passivity of our culture of city life There is a sense of "as long as it isn't me" that allows humans to leak empathy in the moments where we need it most. In a world where people can take lives with only a flick of their finger it is not enough to only take care of yourself We are a community of humans and if we cannot come together and fight for each other in moments like these... Who are we? My mentions are flooded with people (mostly men, go figure) completely misconstruing the point of this thread or accusing me of fabricating this story. Everything I said is easily searchable on Google This isn't about shaming. It is about empathy. Stop being deliberately obtuse Also, there are a lot of people accusing me of only tweeting about this to score points with the ladies Sorry to disappoint you folks, but alas I am gay. So I'm not gonna beat around the bush here I think these tweets are... repulsive Deeply repulsive. So much so that reading them, as I've done now about 20 times, never fails to send a shiver down my spine. And look, I could start to explain why they're bad with some kind of appeal to history Like, I could say that around this time mass shootings were far less in the zeitgeist, and that these men were confused. That they thought they may have been in some kind of a hostage situation Not that the women in the class were about to be murdered. And, I could go on like that, but, I don't want to, you know? Because what makes these tweets awful, isn't that they lack historical rigor. It's that they're downright ghoulish, and more importantly, wrong, about people who experienced a severe trauma No, I don't think I can expect totally untrained men to somehow gang up and fend off a gunman I don't care if there were 50 of them And by the way It was offensive of this author to emphasize that fact and write it in capital letters. [mockingly] 50 men and they didn't do anything? Uh, what were they supposed to do? They were civilians in the line of fire They didn't have the tools to stop this guy They didn't have the time to band together in some kind of video game cutscene and hatch a big smart plan to take out the badie. And besides they were probably in shock and afraid. So no, they didn't do anything wrong or even morally questionable They were just kids in an awful situation That's it. And then the author starts making this into a big political thing and none of it makes any sense at all 'What if men started treating women as equals not as the other?' Well, okay I'm not an anti-feminist by any stretch and I'm open to a conversation about how women are treated unfairly in society I even think misogyny is a relevant factor to take into account in this situation. Since, you know, the guy was killing women in a fight against feminism But why are we making this about the guys who left the room? There's no reason to think they were acting misogynisticly, or even that unconscious misogyny was informing their actions So, bad weird example of the thing you're talking about He also gets into this whole thing about how people are apathetic in the cities and we all don't care enough about each other and need to protect our communities more And again, sure, I can get down with that. But using these guys to make that point is just bad news They were not apathetic city-slickers watching injustice and doing nothing about it. They were not bystanders. There was a gun to their heads and a man telling them to leave And so they did. To use their actions as an example of social apathy is nuts And maybe you think I'm going too far on these tweets, but they really get to me, you know? Like some of the men who left on that day went on to kill themselves. And just imagining these victims reading these tweets, being accused of not caring enough about their fellow classmates, by somebody who has no understanding of the situation whatsoever It's really bothersome. It's not okay. It's not woke. It's not feminist It's just needlessly cruel and it crawls under my skin So, okay. Looking at all this, I have a choice to make right? There are around 260,000 people who liked this tweet, more people than are subscribed to my channel So, how am I supposed to feel about them? Well, I could say... screw'em These people are demonstrating belief in an idea that I find to be sincerely awful And so I could reasonably respond to that by saying, I don't like them They're my political opponents now or whatever And there would be something undeniably fun in that but in this case, I don't know if that approach works Look, maybe I'm saying this just to preserve some faith in human nature But I have a hard time imagining the person who, at their core stans these tweets. Who loves to be woke online but who also fully embraces this toxically masculine narrative where the big strong boys should have taken out the bad guy And call me naive, but I don't think I'm gonna see a lot of dissent in the comment section either I'm willing to bet that basically all of you are at least now Convinced that these tweets are bad It's just too obvious. Too straightforward and common sensical and if we assume that I'm right here Assume that most of the people who liked this tweet just had a strange momentary reaction then we have to ask a question. How did this awful take happen? Why did so many people immediately resonate with it? And while I'm not any kind of mind reader and while I think it's entirely possible that some people Absent-mindedly scrolled through their timelines and just liked a tweet that sounded good without really thinking about it I can't help but think that part of the answer here lies in one of the last tweets in the thread. Where the OP says "It's not about shaming. It's about empathy." I think this is exactly half true It's incorrect because obviously this is about shame There is no other reason to judge these men, and the sheer implication that they did anything wrong here is a way of belittling them and their actions in this dire situation But in another sense the OP is correct. This is about empathy The concept of empathy has a lot of social weight attached to it It's often seen as inextricably linked to morals. Perhaps even the defining feature of humanity itself And because of all those associations it's a difficult thing to define precisely But in this video I want to keep things simple and talk about what seems like the most commonly understood definition of the word 'The experience of feeling what somebody else feels' Of viscerally putting yourself in an other person's shoes What we might call emotional empathy And in this section of the video I want to talk about the unexpected way that empathy is deployed by these tweets to produce results that we are not happy with An appraisal of this tragic situation That clearly doesn't work. And just so you know this analysis is inspired and informed by a book called "Against Empathy" by Professor Paul Bloom of Yale University It's a good read if you're interested in this stuff So as we step into these tweets, our assumption might be that the main figures we're empathizing with here are the women. After all they are the most dramatic victims of this crime and the author does seem very Concerned with what should have been done to protect them It stands to reason then that they are our emotional anchor in this scenario But even though this is the most intuitive interpretation of the text I don't think it really bears out, because in this thread the women are given no emotional weight at all We have zero understanding of where they are Internally and any sense of them has to be read into the situation. Rather, within this narrative it is the men leaving the classroom who we are directed to empathize with Over and over we are brought into their emotional orbit Their experience of failure First, we have the line "instead of teaming up and fighting the shooter all of the men left" This puts us in their shoes Asks us to evaluate their position and make a judgement about it and this positioning becomes even more pronounced later on, as the author writes "There were 50 men Fifty and not one of these men took it upon himself to stand up for these women" Now, we can no longer view the men as completely homogeneous and undifferentiated Now we are asked to take the identity of every man into account as each of them had a specific decision to make, to stay or leave and they all somehow chose the latter Looking at this we can already identify a problem with exclusively using empathy as a way of assigning people moral value Specifically that sometimes feeling close to a situation Doesn't give us the most accurate perspective for analyzing it Survivor guilt is a real thing After the Holocaust many survivors felt a sense of shame at what the Nazis had done to them Shame because of what they had to do to stay alive Shame because they felt weak and impotent because of these events. Shame because they were alive and so many Including their loved ones, were not. And so, reading these tweets, I don't feel like the observations the OP is making are just coming from nowhere Rather, they sound like what I imagined the internal monologue of one of these men might have been like after the shooting 'I was there. I could have done something and didn't. What's wrong with me?' But here's the thing, we're not supposed to honor survivor guilt as a rational impulse, right? No We're supposed to lovingly dismiss it Assure the survivors that they did not do a bad thing and help them get over their trauma But the belief that an empathetic gaze is always appropriate That more empathy is always better, has created a situation where we feel too much Where we accept the narratives of our subjects without a second thought and from this point forward What are we gonna do? Well, we're gonna solve the problem See, there are two relevant unimpeachable facts about this mass shooting First, that eight women were murdered Second that the men in the room left when they were coerced into doing so And now that we firmly placed ourselves in the minds of these men it's only natural to see these two facts as intimately connected and to assert a causal relationship between them Since the first fact is so horrible and tragic, there must be something deeply wrong with the second So maybe misogyny is the culprit here The men must have felt like the lives of their lady classmates were disposable and that's why they left the room Or maybe it's the bystander effect. Our big-city, apathetic attitudes That's an issue... Maybe... So let's graft it on to these guys and imagine that that would help the situation And I think the issue here is kind of obvious. That even though these two facts are true That doesn't mean that changing The latter one is a logical way to change the former As it turns out, the reason 8 women were killed is actually the same as the reason the men escaped: There was a mass shooter in the lecture hall. And within these tweets, that man is positioned as a kind of non-entity I mean, of course he did something wrong He killed people. But within this narrative he comes off feeling less like a moral agent whose actions are worthy of understanding and condemning and working to fight against, and more like an unexpected natural disaster Unstoppable Meaningless No, because we have positioned ourselves so deeply in the world of these men because we have settled into their emotional vantage point, we have to construct a narrative in which they are at the center Even if it doesn't make sense, even if it goes against every principle we have, a bunch of innocent people escaping from a dire situation is now the problem our empathy is asking us to solve Part three: conclusion So the question on the table is: why exactly am I doing this? What do we stand to gain from looking closely at these random tweets? And I think the answer here is fairly simple So often in our moral conversations, we prize empathy above all else Have you walked a mile in the person's shoes? Can you see where they're coming from emotionally? And through this process we generally believe we can show kindness to people, keep an open mind and make the world a better place But what these tweets tell us in their own small way, is that empathy, at least emotional empathy, is not always a reliable or stable way to achieve those ends Empathy is not kindness, but the feeling of closeness. And while it can engender compassion it can also evoke disgust, pain, misunderstanding and confusion Empathy does not encourage us to make things better so much as it zooms us in on one perspective that we identify with, and then encourages us to see the world and its problems only through that very restrictive lens What Paul bloom calls the spotlight effect Now to be clear, even if I wanted to I couldn't stop you from experiencing empathy That's not like within my powers as a video essayist But also I don't think empathy is bad in the first place It's an important part of the way most of us live our lives and experience pleasure and think about things Imagine watching comedy with friends or having sex or reading a sad book without empathy It would be worse and I'm not trying to make life worse But what empathy is not, is a replacement for moral thinking and compassion It isn't some kind of panacea of virtue that can help us in any situation and tell us what we should do And even when we agree with the conclusions that empathy leads us to we should always be suspicious of how we got to those conclusions Sure, I like feminism but not because of the way these dudes acted and if I did like feminism for that reason It would leave us with a lot to be desired Namely, a movement that makes sense. That isn't needlessly ghoulish, that advocates for good I've tried to keep this video as specific as possible and I could now take these ideas and extrapolate them to other things, talk about how empathy is haphazardly deployed in conversations all over the place, from white nationalism to cancel culture to wealth redistribution But I think I should give Lilly a break here and cut things short Besides, I don't think this video should be read as some conclusive argument, and instead as a case study. A moment that illustrates some points that I find interesting and important So with that I'll leave you here on one note Earlier on, I talked about why I resented these tweets so much How I imagined myself in the shoes of one of these guys Experiencing a trauma and then being told ridiculous judgmental reasons why I didn't stop it. That would feel Horrible. And in that moment, it would have been easy to look at this author and say 'Wow. I guess he lacks empathy' Otherwise, how could he see things the way he does? It would be impossible. But that Isn't true What separates my position from his is not that I have empathy and he lacks it We're just empathizing in different ways. Him with one set of emotional experiences, me with another. It can be pleasing to think we believe what we believe because of some deep-seated emotional quality Something that we possess and that the people who disagree with us do not. But in this case I think the more simple, more unflinching, less gratifying explanation, is the accurate one That the difference between his tweets and my video, the only difference that really matters is that my moral interpretation of these events is just the better one More compassionate, more coherent. This isn't about shame and it isn't about empathy It's about the fact that I think I'm right and I think he's wrong So that's the end of the video. Thank you so much for watching. And if you liked it, be sure to like, comment, subscribe Give me money on patreon if you want to, you know the drill. Also go check out Lilly's channel She's mothcub on YouTube and she's an artist on all kinds of... websites And now it's time for my patreon question of the video Jacob Friedman asks, "are you aware of the Danish number system?" Well, I would look it up right now, but I feel like that's cheating. So the answer is no. Okay, goodbye. Thank you patrons and everyone else, bye!
just CQC the gunman 4head
Good video, thanks for sharing.
something tells me whoever wrote that tweet never had a gun pointed to their head