Oxytocin is a curious chemical and a fickle one, too. Are empathetic people empathetic? Well, no. Not without a lot of cognitive empathy in addition to their emotional empathy. Absent cognitive empathy, the only endangered species, and I mean this metaphorically and literally, people care about are charismatic megafauna. Whether or not and to what degree one gets a social diminished capacity defense for one’s weirdness and non-violent mistakes over the course of any periood of trauma has mostly to do with whether the oxytocin of people regards one as charasmatic megafauna. That was certainly the case for me and since I belong not to the charasmatic megafauna, I was subject to the derision and discipline of my society without much sympathy.
This was no different than any other hard times in my life. People, generally, lack compassion for those they don’t viscerally find sympathetic and/or cute. For the most part, people lack compassion of any sort. They’ll feel bad for a cute kid with cancer but not enough to make any real sacrifice for them and anything less cute, it is impossible for them to care about. Even if a few people do, they can’t make up for the consequences begotten on account of the many who don’t. The largest major at the college I attended was business, a fact which screams to me the verse Matthew 7:14. They may go to Hell, eventually, but in the here and now that doesn’t help people in my position much. The average person spends a pittance in hours and money on noble causes, if any.
While society is ostensibly more empathetic toward issues of mental health. With the hypersensivity of society, people were more easily offended by minor behavior issues. This is not only Twitter and other online vigilantes but creeps into the legal since in our society if someone sees a strange person in a city park, the instinct is to call the police. Things that in the 1990s would be excused as someone being a nonviolent mental case that don’t require law enforcement, the police are called more. There is significantly less empathy for people going thorugh hard times and this is, in large part, owing to the hypersensivity. The Swift-esque self-pity makes people assign themselves victim status when soneone, often with a mental health condition, offends them.
That tended to be the response I got when I did weird or otherwise offensive things after the deaths of my mother and uncle in a short period. The empathy was nil and I mostly got villified for minor behavior issues and the police called on me for nonviolent incidents that did not require them. They made a bad situation much, much, worse. Society’s response was to ignore everything I had been through and to explain how I hurt their feelings when they were nuking my feelings. There was a lot of empathy for mental illness but that empathy was mostly directed inward and was people empathizing with their own mental illnesses and them convincing everyone who hurt their feelings was toxic. There was no attempt to empathize with me and I was never entitled to understanding or forgiveness.
The result was a living hell for me. If the price of their comfort was to throw me to the wolves, that price was worth it. My mind was screaming with scathing and desperate agony. Less from traditional grief and more from anxiety. None of them seemed to care because they were all solipsistic and the way to mental health for them was to seek comfort and to get rid of anyone who caused them discomfort. If we sacrifice for one another, everyone will suffer less. If we selfishly pursue our own comfort, then everyone will suffer more. Of course, they didn’t know what what was happening in my life and while it is a cliché to realize you don’t know what another is going through, people tend to have the strong cognitive bias WYSIATI, what you see is all there is, and lack the metacognition to counter it. They imagined me as a normal middle-class stock character whose life was blank except for the little they knew. They had no empthy for me nor the inclination toward it. They’d judge me for one episode and hate me forevermore and consider my ruin to be a peripheral event of little effect on the story of their lives.
The Autistic Resistance 