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Found, via that great means of randomly surfing the Internet, this great thought regarding intelligence:
Empathy is a way of seeing, and therefore a way of knowing. To avoid empathy is to limit one's own perspective to only one's own perspective — to choose not to see and therefore to choose not to know. Worse than that — it is to choose not to be able to know.
Empathy, in other words, makes you smarter and wiser. Rejecting empathy makes you dumber and more foolish. To choose not to see what empathy shows us is to choose stupidity. (source = The Slacktivist)
The author was talking about the Tea Party, which has become synonymous with the modern Republican Party. I will let his assertion stand or fall on its own merits, which covers the "politics" part of this post's title. I will also point out that empathy is like any other sense-based skill - you can work to enhance it or not, and just like there are no blind painters, some people simply don't have the ability to perceive empathy.
Where I want to go with this is with regards to writing. Simply put, it's hard to write characters if you, the writer, don't have empathy. After all, writing a character is creating someone else's perspective. A lot of people without empathy write fiction and it shows - they end up with virtuous good guys and bad guys who are bad just because. Except, many "bad guys" don't think they are bad. They think that everything they are doing is right, correct and true.
Circling back to intelligence, even crazy people do things for a logical reason. The logic may be crazy, but it makes sense to the person doing it. Without empathy, you end up with characters doing things not because it makes sense, but because it's convenient for the author.
If you want to write believable characters, develop a sense of empathy.
Empathy is a way of seeing, and therefore a way of knowing. To avoid empathy is to limit one's own perspective to only one's own perspective — to choose not to see and therefore to choose not to know. Worse than that — it is to choose not to be able to know.
Empathy, in other words, makes you smarter and wiser. Rejecting empathy makes you dumber and more foolish. To choose not to see what empathy shows us is to choose stupidity. (source = The Slacktivist)
The author was talking about the Tea Party, which has become synonymous with the modern Republican Party. I will let his assertion stand or fall on its own merits, which covers the "politics" part of this post's title. I will also point out that empathy is like any other sense-based skill - you can work to enhance it or not, and just like there are no blind painters, some people simply don't have the ability to perceive empathy.
Where I want to go with this is with regards to writing. Simply put, it's hard to write characters if you, the writer, don't have empathy. After all, writing a character is creating someone else's perspective. A lot of people without empathy write fiction and it shows - they end up with virtuous good guys and bad guys who are bad just because. Except, many "bad guys" don't think they are bad. They think that everything they are doing is right, correct and true.
Circling back to intelligence, even crazy people do things for a logical reason. The logic may be crazy, but it makes sense to the person doing it. Without empathy, you end up with characters doing things not because it makes sense, but because it's convenient for the author.
If you want to write believable characters, develop a sense of empathy.
