Greece: Hysterical Empathy in Action

No sooner had I described Hysterical Empathy in connection with Irish deportation cases than an even better example dropped in our laps – at the Greek border.

A reminder:

Hysterical Empathy is the tendency to dramatise and personalise news stories by reducing them to their simplistic and immediate heart-wrenching moments, to the exclusion and out-right repudiation all other factors.

• It is characterised by its resemblance to Histrionic Personality Disorder in its narcissism, emotional exhibitionism, low tolerance for frustration, superficiality and carelessness for long term consequences and side-effects of actions.
• It is exacerbated by social media and by the growing influence of women as a political audience/ actors.
• It can be genuine, but is also manufactured and is manipulated by groups in pursuit of hidden goals. The prime agitators and exploiters are activists –journalists of the respectable media, activist groups and NGOs (to the limited extent those are different things).
• Those who agitate and exploit Hysterical Empathy are themselves keenly aware of the larger implications and long-term effects of their actions.

The situation in Greece crisis is overflowing with examples of Hysterical Empathy in action:

• The use of heart-rending images regardless of how unrepresentative or misleading they are.

• The obsessive and cynical use of the descriptor “Women and Children” in relation to migrants, despite it being proven on multiple occasions that most are single men of working age.

• Respectable Media clerics recycling the propaganda of a hostile government in emotional terms, without any explication of what larger agenda might be at play.

• Finally, and most importantly, the exploitation of the Crisis by the wider activist community to further the goal of accelerated demographic change.

For Hysterical Empathy to work the public must be agitated to fever pitch through relentless repetition of shameless clichés and melodrama – and that’s what’s been happening.

There is a crisis in Greece. Where women and children are involved, it is terrible and worth talking about. The violence is horrible. I wouldn’t want to be there and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone I cared about. All of these things are worth talking about in the wider context of the situation.

But It’s not the case that the only thing worth thinking about is how Europeans can sublimate their own needs the instant someone arrives at their border. I don’t like the Hysterical Empathy approach. I won’t be lectured by the people-traffickers, propagandists and gaslighters that make up the heads of the NGO-Media-Government Hydra. Neither should you.