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Mostly unscientific thread on hyper- and hypo-empathy in radical or subcultural spaces. Short story, they both have problems and are more complex than commonly understood. It impacts a lot. There are some hopeful trends.
Some people kind of worship hyper-empathy as a spiritual evolution and for sure, some very empathic people are just straight up gems of humans. Sensitive and humble. Brave and compassionate. Good boundaries with a supportive attitude. But of course this is not all of them.
However there is a fair amount of scientific research on the pitfalls of empathy generally. The two most common ones are nearness and scale fallacies. Basically a picture of one person in harm motivates more emotions than the knowledge of say an entire refugee crisis.
This is exacerbated by the fact that you can only feel so much empathy. Like the difference between one million and one billion bad things does not accurately scale in felt emotions. However I would argue there's another failure mode of hyper-empathy and that's narcissism.
Empathy is such a visceral thing that it can make you feel like the center of the worlds story. Leading to things like manipulative self-obsession and martyrdom. but more dangerous bc they can model yr emotions p well to mess with you! ie 'tenderqueers' etc.
People like this are hard in community bc they can be really likeable. They might even do good activism. And can put on a good show of caring about people but it comes at a hidden cost. These forms of manipulation can be hard to spot and do lotsa damage. https://c4ss.org/content/50646
It's tricky because empathy is one of the foremost altruistic reasons that people get involved with radical subcultures. They just care about other people and have a vested stake in improving people's well being because they also feel it!
But without other emotional and intellectual skills alongside empathy, it can go pretty sour. Now on to the maybe even spicier one -- hypo-empathy.
Obv the term "sociopathy" is commonly used here. I avoid it for its problematic reasons but it does point to a somewhat real and important set of issues in radical communities. However, like most diagnoses it does so by kind of randomly aggregating a bunch of dif traits.
Here's an article about the waves of subcultures in relation to self-serving empathy-less saboteurs. https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
However, there are also some not well known edge cases. I have a friend who is unable, whether nature or nurture, to experience empathy. But he's decidedly not what people would call a 'sociopath'. He just effectively models other people's emotions using consequentialism.
He's just a nice and good guy! Very curious and nerdy. Not like some evil genius manipulator. Idk how he developed himself that way but he did. (this is sometimes called "altruistic sociopathy" when they use powers for good but not a lot of literature).
But of course he's not the norm when we talk about hypo-empathy. We're talking about something extremely dangerous to the kinds of high trust, loving, and good faith radical subcultures. no empathy plus narcissism and minus clear ethics is a seriously dangerous person.
But again, now we have narcissism and both ends of the spectrum of empathy (tho i'd guess the hypo-empathic are less prone to martyrdom. Also the notion that "sociopaths" are more intelligent than average, aside from the problematics of 'intelligence' are disproven.)
It's been my experience that hyper-empaths and hypo-empaths are often drawn to each other in ways that bring out the worst in both parties. IMO usually the hyper-empaths get the worst of this deal, but can develop really messed up copes and ways of relating as a result.
The hypo-empaths can play the emotions of the hyper-empath like strings. The hyper-empath keeps expecting the hypo-empath to acknowledge their emotions and gets stockholm for the feigned crumbs of it. Fiery exciting relationship that is deeply devastating ensues.
Some hyper-empaths develop heuristics for weeding out those without empathy after a few such shindigs others codependently pursue it for the rest of their lives. Whatever that magical self and community work is that helps people heal in these complexes is good stuff.
IDK how to fix these problems. I'd like to believe in transformative and restorative justice for all involved. However the hypo-empaths sometimes are serial abusers who will just manipulate the process and continue their behavior. And the hypers- can just get stuck in toxicity.
I think radical communities are starting to get language around some of the externalities of this issue (such as really undermining things like call-outs through their manipulative projects). IDK about subcultures more broadly (antifa furries i guess?).
In the last like 5 years alone i've actually seen a lot more nuance flow into the conversations surrounding such blow ups in my communities and i do appreciate it and it gives me hope. Though the younger generations will have to go through it for themselves somewhat.
(it's cringy to write but i am most certainly on the hyper-empath side of this coin. whether i have developed good skills for it is left as an exercise to the reader)
Also maybe it goes without saying but, all of the related traits discussed here exist on scales that vary person to person. Most everyone is a mixture of everything and can change moment to moment.
also also occasionally some people think they are hyper- when they're actually hypo-, and vice versa lol
