The ability to empathize and oppress others!

Human survival and happiness depends on collective life, and collective life without “identity” is a camp of collective and gradual death.

Empathy means our understanding of the pain or pleasure of others, as if that pain or pleasure happened in our existence. Without identification, there is no ground left for social ethics and bioethics, except for the whip of the law, which is not very effective against human selfishness and self-interest.

In fact, what makes it easy to oppress others is the oppressor’s inability to understand the suffering of the oppressed. A society whose members and components do not see each other and do not cry over each other’s pains is a corrupt and decaying group. Such a society, not a place to live and boast, which is a prison for suffering and depression.

Mrs. Hannah Arendt in the book “Eichmann in Jerusalem” shows well that there is an inverse and very precise relationship between the oppression of others and the ability to empathize; That is, as much as an individual or a society is unable to identify with the same identity, it is more capable and bolder in oppression, crime and killing; Because another suffering does not arouse any emotion in him to prevent him.

According to Hannah Arendt’s research, Adolf Eichmann, an officer of the German Nazi army and one of the accused in the Holocaust, was a family-loving, polite person, with all social principles and even positive thoughts; But he didn’t have a single bit of empathy. For this reason, it was easy for him to kill people and it had no meaning other than fulfilling an organizational duty.

Self-identification is more or less in the nature of all humans, but there are ways that strengthen it or bring it to the level necessary for collective living. Music, stories, novels, and cinema are the most successful in strengthening and intensifying identification among humans and teach us that others exist, suffer, and suffer like us.

Cinema and any art or technique or program that can bring a person out of his laziness, and affect him from the pain and suffering of others, has done the most moral thing possible.