Wandrail
I'm your Huckleberry
Well, a lack of empathy is a big problem actually. Serial killers, murderers and the like generally have no sense of empathy and are extremely narcissistic, as are alot of people who have dysfunctional roles in society. The ability to identify with basic, common human emotions, especially death is pretty vital. I'm not quite so relativistic myself, I know that minds develop different ways, because obviously this guy in California who just killed those 9 women and children and was engaged in incest and whatever else did not develop the same way that I did, but I have no problem saying he's wrong, what he did was evil, and that he's gotta go - bye fella! I don't think along the lines of everyone being a total victim of the environment that 'we as society' have put them in and that we need to understand these people who are murderers, terrorists, what have you. If these people either could see or allowed themselves to see at some point the consequences of their actions on the lives of others, and empathize with it, then they would probably not have gone down the twisted road they went down, and would have been different people.
I believe in the end we are products of our choices more than anything else, and in society being able to emotionally be in someone else's shoes helps you make the right choices for yourself, others, and the world around you. And you can't deny that the morbidity of alot of this type of music has the effect on some impressionable people, especially young people, that life has less meaning, or at least that they want people to think that life has less meaning to them by the callous way they choose to react to situations like death, and that is just childish to me. A lack of real empathy, whether the product of continued muting, numbing, or rationalization is detrimental. In the more extreme personal cases, it turns into psychotic narcissism and you get Ted Bundy types who only view the world around them in terms of their own immediate desires and indulgences, and never understand or care what it does to other people.
I believe in the end we are products of our choices more than anything else, and in society being able to emotionally be in someone else's shoes helps you make the right choices for yourself, others, and the world around you. And you can't deny that the morbidity of alot of this type of music has the effect on some impressionable people, especially young people, that life has less meaning, or at least that they want people to think that life has less meaning to them by the callous way they choose to react to situations like death, and that is just childish to me. A lack of real empathy, whether the product of continued muting, numbing, or rationalization is detrimental. In the more extreme personal cases, it turns into psychotic narcissism and you get Ted Bundy types who only view the world around them in terms of their own immediate desires and indulgences, and never understand or care what it does to other people.
