Zompist Bboard Again

This is inspired by another thread.

How would society function if all humans were at least average or above average in empathy? Basically if we "cut off" bottom 50% of people with lowest empathy/agreeableness and only leave those who are at least average or above average.

How would such a human society function?

I think we need more specs. Are you assuming empathy is an innate condition, as opposed to learned behavior? 'Cos if it's learned, you need mechanisms to teach it.

Also, what do you mean by empathy? That people are nicer, more communtarian? Are they simply passively nice, less apt to take advantage of others, or are they active, seeking ways to help others?

The cheap answer, perhaps, is that a more empathetic society could be anything humans do, only it'd actually work as planned. Capitalist empaths would treat their employees nicely; communist ones would make communism work; religious ones would make a religious community. If there are problems, they'd be addressed with understanding.

More deeply, I'd ask, do you see no positive aspects of aggression and nonconformity? What happens if another nation or species invades? Doesn't art or science or technology sometimes need someone with an idiosyncratic uncompromising vision?

I think you could also make a dystopia out of this. People can be quite nice and yet live in a nasty system. If I recall from Ares Land's description of the Aztecs, captives kept for human sacrifice were treated very nicely up to the moment of death.

(In fact I'm reminded of Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Her Teixcalaanli Empire is arguably very nice, and yet ruthlessly imperialist.

A regular definition of emotional empathy - ability to care about other humans, feel a sense connection with them and to behave altruistically about them.

The more empathetic one is, the more people one sees as "their own" and fewer as "the other".

And yes, empathy is genetically determined at least to a significant degree. However, above average empathetic people are still capable of harming other beings but their threshhold for doing this is higher.

Unconventionality, intellectual and artistic interests are related to another aspect of personality called Openness to Experience which is independent of empathy.

At the very least I think there would be much fewer wars. Wars over resources would still happen (after all other means of dialogue have been exhausted) but all those pointless dick wagging wars waged over ideology, past grievances or for the sake of someone's ego would not exist.

Very good idea. Dystopias are far more common in writing than utopias are. I found out just recently that Brave New World had a sequel called Island in which all the bad things were replaced with good things. Of course, the novel still has conflict in it .... it's not written for toddlers .... but since I havent read either of the two books, I cant give any more details.

A society like this could still evolve into a dystopia. In fact I think it's a common enough trope .... I've seen it three times myself, and consider that I don't do a whole lot of reading. The basic idea is that humans are so kind and gentle that they lose the ability to fight off their natural predators, such as lions, wolves, and so on .... or that humans are so kind and gentle that they submit willingly to an invasion from aliens in which all humans irrevocably become slaves .... or, in the third story, this is just a small society of humans, and they are massacred by other humans who did not drop their arms.

Yet, empathy and pacifism are not the same thing. A highly empathic society could in fact be very warlike, in the sense that there would be a class of people, probably men, who would risk their lives to fight off even the slightest threat to their nation's women and children, while the women and children would devote themselves to protecting the even weaker members of their society.

My own people are very pacifistic, and this is biologically bound, so that they are pacifists in all times and all places, and therefore, atlhough there is still some natural human variation between different political movements at different times, the so-called opportunistic invasion, where a small but virulent army rides in and makes toys of the entire remainder of the human population, simply never happens. I'm not sure that I'd say they have more empathy for each other than we do, though .... they still have conflicts of all sorts, and even if they are typically less violent, they still have many problems to deal with in their societies.

Basically your path is a wide open field. I do agree at least with this:

At the very least I think there would be much fewer wars. Wars over resources would still happen (after all other means of dialogue have been exhausted) but all those pointless dick wagging wars waged over ideology, past grievances or for the sake of someone's ego would not exist.

But you could perhaps come up with creative ways to start long-running conflicts that *don't* involve war.

Already you can see in societies like Norway/Sweden that even prison sentences are reduced as much as possible and prisons are empty. A highly empathetic society would abhor death penalty Labor camp or confiscation of property would be the worst punishment.

Empathetic people are still capable of violence so they would defend themselves if attacked.

Left and Right wing politics would still exist as those depend more on Openness to Experience than on empathy but vast majority of political discourse would be via dialogue rather than political violence.

In addition
- crime including organized crime and white collar crime would be significantly lower, at least 60-70% lower
- there would be fewer bilionaires due to less greed
- standing militaries would be 70-80% smaller
- police forces would be likewise 70-75% smaller

Maybe it would remind us of a hive or an anthill. Social insects run on a crude form of empathy: they react to their sister's signal. Sometimes they react to other colony members' distress most strongly than to their own: older ants of bees lose all sense of self-preservation but distress signals from other ants/bees triggers strong reactions.

Unexpected consequences: social insects are vulnerable to parasitism. A number of insects thrive on ant colonies: they emit the right signals and the ants take core of them. Parasitism can get baroque: several species of ants act as parasites within a colony of a different species. This evolved several times independantly. Less dramatically, within a colony, a surprising number of ants are slackers.

Translating this to the human experience... A highly empathetic human society would be vulnerable to human parasites. Suppose for some reason an individual is born into your society without much empathy. He could grow very prosperous as a conman. (Less dramatically, again, you'd get a number of slackers.)
But... Naturally enough the society would have defense mechanisms agains this. It could be interesting to work these out.