Occupy empathy? Online politics and micro-narratives of suffering

Abstract

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to the political potential of online communities, and raised questions about the forms of emotional commitment that such communities engender. It has also generated a backlash, as supporters of the political-economic status quo have gone online to question or condemn the movement. This paper performs a discourse analysis of the messages left at one anti-Occupy site called We Are The 53%, in order to see whether such messages engaged with the idea that the current economic system creates unfair hardship and suffering. Surprisingly, the majority of the messages at We Are The 53% did not deny the existence of such hardship, but instead evinced a kind of superficial empathy with the suffering of others that viewed others’ misfortune as ultimately manageable. The paper thus questions the progressive political value of empathy in online spaces.

Keywords

Emotion empathy micro-blogs micro-narratives Occupy politics social media suffering

In October 2011, a woman who had grown up in a poor neighborhood, from a family on food stamps, who was suffering from an illness that kept her in near-constant pain, and with a mother living 1000 miles away due to a lack of affordable housing nearby, ventured online to voice her support for a growing protest movement (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11340790087). A few days later, a 33-year-old Mexican-American woman visited the same protest website and left a similar message of support for its cause, describing herself as a recovering drug addict who had worked for five years at minimum wage before eking her way into the ‘lower middle class’ (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11439857000/). Later that day a man named Ben visited the site and described his own life story, in which his inability to afford college figured prominently in a history of low-paying, manual labor employment and luxuries denied. He and his wife had even decided not to have offspring, since they realized that they ‘could simply not afford to raise children’ (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11439986015).

The protest movement with which these three people had gone online in solidarity, and for which hundreds of others had posted similar biographically-based messages of support, was not, as one might have expected, Occupy Wall Street, or one of the other regional Occupy variations. Instead, these people contributed to a website entitled We Are The 53% (http://the53.tumblr.com/), devoted to countering the messages of the Occupy protesters and their ‘We are the 99%’ slogan. We Are The 53% takes its name from the idea that only 53% of Americans pay taxes. This site, emblazoned with the phrase ‘to those of us who pay for those of you who whine,’ attacks the idea that the government owes any kind of redistribution of wealth to those less fortunate. Instead, the site suggests that Americans who are struggling to make ends meet should be proud of their contributions to the country’s collective wealth and their own steadfast refusal to rely on anyone other than themselves.

This paper examines the ways in which contributors to micro-blogs such as We Are The 53% deploy brief, biographical narratives about personal hardship and suffering in the service of larger political goals. The micro-narratives of suffering on this site attest to the fact that economic hardships are not only experienced by liberals or radicals who want to change the political and economic system. Contributors to We Are The 53% shared their own tales of misfortune in ways that countered or diverted the affective political claims of the Occupy movement and instead supported the socio-economic status quo. More than simply denying the existence of such misfortune, the contributors to the site offered a limited form of empathy for those less fortunate and, in some cases, shared their own stories in the hopes of receiving empathy from other readers of the site.

This runs counter to some established conceptions of what empathy is and how it functions politically and in online communities. Liberal scholars and pundits will often characterize conservative movements as ‘denying’ empathy (see Johnson, 2005), and such denial of empathy has been regarded as a way of distancing oneself from the suffering and injustice faced by others (Seu, 2012). At the same time, empathy is frequently lauded as a central component of effective and humane political action. Richard Sennett (2012) has suggested that ‘empathy has a particular political application,’ that can aid community workers, priests, and teachers, and may even allow a legislator or union leader to ‘learn from his or her constituents rather than simply speak in their name’ (22–23). Scholars of online communities have also shown that empathetic exchanges with others are a valuable component of such communities, and that ‘empathy is probably common online’ (Preece, 1999: 76). Thus, the prominence of certain forms of empathy at a reactionary, conservative micro-blog like We Are The 53% provides an opportunity to expand our understandings of the politics behind this emotion, and the surprising ends to which it is expressed online.

For those reasons, this paper employs a discourse analysis of the messages left at the We Are The 53% Tumblr in October 2011, its most active month. Similar discourse analyses have been performed for a host of different online spaces and subjects, ranging from the comments sections of newspaper websites (Hughey and Daniels, 2013), to message boards created for female skateboarders (MacKay and Dallaire, 2013), to ethnic joke threads on anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish websites (Weaver, 2013), to support forums for gambling addicts (Mudry and Strong, 2013), to name a very few. In my analysis, I have attempted to operate at what Alvesson and Karreman (2000) describe as the meso-level of discourse analysis, in which one attempts to remain ‘relatively sensitive to language use in context but interested in finding broader patterns and going beyond the details of the text and generalizing to similar local contexts’ (1133). However, my analysis is also concerned with the goals of critical discourse analysis as delineated by Fairclough (1989), inasmuch as it seeks to explain particular discursive conventions on these sites ‘as the outcome of power relations and power struggle’ (2). The struggle at the core of my analysis is over whose suffering is seen as legitimate, and what social, economic, and political responses to that suffering are viewed as appropriate. This battle is waged by the contributors to We Are The 53% site by framing their own life stories of managing hardship and overcoming suffering as equally or even more deserving of public attention.

Analyzing the rhetorical strategies employed at this site as counter-arguments to the Occupy movement thus reveals potential strengths and weaknesses in that movement’s claims, and exposes larger issues about the online presentation of identity and emotion. Rather than simply ignoring the suffering inflicted by an unjust economic system, or denying the prospects for empathy with others who have suffered, the messages at We Are The 53% do something slightly different. This paper argues that the most frequently occurring type of messages at the site exhibited a kind of superficial empathy. In such a message, one’s own autobiographical account of overcoming economic obstacles and personal crises without government assistance was used as evidence that others who suffered similar hardships could, would, or should be able to overcome such suffering as well, and that larger political or economic reforms were therefore unnecessary. It was not, then, that these contributors had refused to consider the suffering of others, but that they had empathized with others’ hardship too easily, without fully grasping the many potential differences between themselves and these imagined others. In essence, the micro-narratives of suffering deployed at We Are The 53% acted as both a guarantee of the humanity and authenticity of their authors, and as a way of forestalling a more fully empathetic contemplation of the suffering of others. This finding suggests that empathy itself may be a less politically progressive orientation towards others than much recent scholarship has asserted.

We Are The 99 Percent

We Are The 99 Percent and We Are The 53%, are both hosted by Tumblr, a micro-blogging site that is home to almost 28 million individual blogs containing over 10 billion posts (Pingdom Blog, 2011). Tumblr allows users to create social networks by following, re-blogging, and commenting on the images and posts of others, while also encouraging shorter posts than those associated with older styles of less explicitly networked weblogs. Wearethe99percent.tumblr.com has attracted many thousands of posts since its inception on 8 September 2011. In the month of October 2011 alone, by my count, there were over 2400 posts. Its posts have also been shared and re-blogged across a number of platforms—one picture uploaded to the site by a retired Navy veteran was reposted on the Facebook page of Occupy New Brunswick and subsequently liked by 21,920 people, shared by 10,114 people, and commented on by 2,223 people (Gaby and Caren, 2012). Thus, the pictures and messages on these sites have the potential to reach a wide audience.

We Are The 99 Percent began with very simple instructions to its readers and potential contributors:

Make a sign. Write your circumstance at the top, no longer than a single sentence. Examples: ‘I am a student with $25,000 in debt.’ ‘I need surgery and I’m more worried about the expense than my health.’ ‘I’m a homeowner who’s about to face foreclosure.’ Below that, write ‘I am the 99 percent.’ Below that, write ‘OccupyTogether.’ Then, take a picture of yourself holding the sign and submit it to us (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/submit).

The aesthetic that emerged from these directions combines the accounts of personal troubles often carried on cardboard signs by many urban homeless people (Roth, 2011) with a photo-visual immediacy akin to the ‘proof of life’ photos that kidnappers supply along with their ransom demands in order to establish that their hostages are still alive. Here, contributors showed their faces next to handwritten signs describing personal tales of economic hardship and insecurity in order to guarantee a kind of authenticity. This also served to combat the shame associated with losing one’s job or receiving public assistance—‘by showing your face, by embodying your lack of shame,’ one creates ‘a positive affect of joyful solidarity’ (1: para. 20).

Interestingly, the instructions at We Are The 99 Percent were almost immediately subverted in two ways—users posted images that obscured their faces and posted much more than a single sentence. In any case, these contributors shared their critique of the political-economic system using extensive tales of personal and familial misfortune as evidence. As one fairly typical entry stated:

I’m 25 y/o trying to pay my bills on a waitress income—yet I am a certified teacher holding 2 BA degrees + $50,000 in debt. These loans are now DUE! What am I supposed to do? Having a house and family someday now seems like a pipe dream… I’m the 99%! (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/post/12175259459/).

Some other posts, especially those dealing with family or health crises, could be quite heart-wrenching. One such entry came from a young man who posted a photo of himself at what appeared to be an Occupy encampment holding a large placard that read ‘I’m here for my friends who had to choose between paying for their chemotherapy treatments and paying their rent—They’re dead now. They were the 99%’ (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/post/12116150009). Topics such as student loans, children, unemployment, and healthcare were the most commonly discussed at We Are The 99 Percent (Konczal, 2011). Messages about these topics provided intimate testaments to our current moment’s ‘economic strain and the toll it is taking on people’s family, social, working, and mental lives’ (Trudell, 2012: 24), whether those people were students facing an unsure future, parents worried about being able to provide for their children, or retirees with mounting medical bills, empty savings accounts, and underwater mortgages. This site, like other micro-blogs, digital archives, or social networking sites, allowed individuals to condense their life stories into short, intimate, easily digestible micro-narratives of suffering.

We Are The 53%

We Are The 53% (the53.tumblr.com) takes a diametrically opposed political stance, but does so in ways that mimic the aesthetics of We Are The 99 Percent, and even adopts some of the same rhetorical techniques. Both sites make claims about the causes and meanings behind the suffering of American citizens, often in similar ways. There is an added level of complexity to the rhetoric at We Are The 53%, however, because the narratives and messages posted to this site are at least implicitly responding to the claims of the Occupy movement and its website, in addition to sharing their contributors’ own autobiographical tales. Given that the stated political aims of We Are The 53% are so different from We Are The 99 Percent—the former essentially supports the political-economic status quo, while the latter seeks to radically transform it—it is worth investigating how the contributors to both sites depict suffering and engage with the social and political potential of empathy.

Aesthetically, the anti-Occupy site mimics the design of We Are The 99 Percent, in that each entry contains a picture, presumably self-taken, of a user holding up a piece of paper containing that user’s personal message and some variation of the sign-off ‘I am the 53%.’ On We Are The 53%, conservative pundit Erick Erickson, one of the site’s founders, submitted the first entry, which became a model for subsequent posts. It consists of a picture of him holding up a piece of paper on which he has handwritten the words:

I work 3 jobs. I have a house I can’t sell. My family insurance costs are outrageous. But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up you whiners. I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain. (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11055265485/).

A total of 503 other people subsequently submitted their own pictures and stories to the site in that first month—more than contributed to We Are The 99 Percent in its first full month of existence. Both sites speak to the kinds of asynchronous conversations that the Internet makes possible within, and between, communities.

These micro-blogs exhibit many of the norms governing public emotional expression on the Internet today, and speak to the complex relationship between personal suffering, online communities, and contemporary political movements. Both sites make specific connections between the private suffering of the contributors and their families, and the larger political question of how collective resources are to be distributed. In this way, much as with other narratives that structure social movements online, the micro-narratives of suffering shared at these sites enabled individuals to increase their sense of identification with and connection to one another and, potentially, to larger networks of people and groups opposed to the Occupy movement (see Bennett and Toft, 2009). Public websites for all sorts of organizations typically create cohesive and persuasive narratives by answering questions like ‘Who are we?’ and ‘How do we act?’, (Bennett et al., 2011: 224) and these are precisely the sorts of personal details that individual contributors seek to share with and model for one another on We Are The 53%. As with its pro-Occupy counterpart, the messages left on this Tumblr deploy private suffering within the public sphere of the Internet and, in so doing, at least implicitly construct their empathy for others, or their request for empathy from others, based on the notion that sharing such personal tales of misfortune and woe online is a legitimate and politically meaningful action.

Suffering, empathy, and the affective public sphere

Contemporary understandings of the political potential of mass communication technologies often take Habermas’ (2001) highly rational conception of the public sphere as a starting point. Yet many scholars have noted that a conception of public communication or political speech that accounts only for reason and rationality neglects much of what goes on when we make political-economic claims (see Bickford, 2011; Crossley, 1998; Vetlesen, 1994). Emerging out of developments in feminist theory and queer theory, the recent ‘affective turn’ in social thought (Clough, 2007; Hardt, 2007) has positioned emotions more centrally within debates about mass media and politics, across a range of disciplines. Coupled with an increasing sociological focus on the role of emotions in a wide variety of public contexts since the late 1970s (see Wisecup et al., 2007), something resembling a consensus appears to be emerging on the importance of the emotional and affective aspects of human behavior in determining public opinion and political affiliation.

Emotions are, of course, ineluctably bound to the experience of human suffering—either one’s own suffering, or that of distant others. The modern project has in many ways been based on the idea of progressively relieving unnecessary pain and hardship (Abbas, 2010; Leet, 2002), although the continued failures of efforts to alleviate various forms of suffering still pose problems for the legitimacy of modern states or other large-scale actors. Still, as Asma Abbas (2010: 4) notes, ‘the degree to which our senses contest the imposed modes of the presence and absence of suffering is the degree to which we are political.’

The precise terminology for such emotional concern for others’ suffering has varied historically and continues to vary within academic disciplines today. Boltanski (1999), following Arendt (1951), has described the period from the Enlightenment to the French Revolution as one in which pity for suffering others came to be an explicitly political stance. And yet Boltanski (1999) also points to the different conceptions of feeling for one’s fellow man that thinkers like Hutcheson (1725), Hume (1739/1984), and Smith (1759/2002) all variously labeled as sympathy. To complicate matters more, current trends indicate that this direction of emotion toward others is often understood as empathy. Although some theories of affect seek to circumvent or transcend these definitional concerns by describing a more deeply embodied sense of emotionality (Clough, 2007), it is worth spending another moment to clarify these distinctions.

Empathy is a translation of the German Einfühlung, a term coined in the late-19th century to describe an aesthetic relationship in which one projects oneself, psychologically or emotionally, into an object or work of art (Koss, 2006). The term has since been adapted by psychologists and psychotherapists who speak of the ‘empathic accuracy’ (Ickes, 1993) of their assessments of patients’ inner drives, and also by the corporate world in the form of human resources and business management guides that advise leaders to think in terms of the points of view of others (Illouz, 2008). Scholars like Alison Landsberg (2009) have credited mass communication technologies like film and television with enlarging the public’s potential to empathize with a wider variety of people who are increasingly different from themselves. She suggests that such mass-mediated empathy ‘enables the larger political project of advancing egalitarian social goals through a more radical form of democracy’ (Landsberg, 2009: 222). The philosopher and ethicist Michael Slote (2007: 4) has argued that ‘all, or almost all, the moral distinctions we intuitively or commonsensically want to make can be understood in terms of… distinctions of empathy.’ An even more laudatory world-historical conception of empathy has been advanced by Jeremy Rifkin (2009), who posits that a progressive decline in material scarcity and concurrent increase in global, technologically mediated interconnectedness has, over the past half-century in the West, put us on a path to a ‘universal empathic connectivity’ (Rifkin, 2009: 616) that can help us avert planetary ecological collapse.

Such grand scholarly claims about empathy’s radical egalitarian political potential are reflected, to an extent, on the ground in contemporary political discourse as well. From Bill Clinton, who professed to feel our pain, to George W. Bush, who assured us his was a compassionate conservatism, to Barack Obama, who spoke specifically of an ‘empathy deficit’ (quoted in Johnson, 2010: 504) in American society, American politicians at the highest levels of both major parties profess to espouse the value of understanding what others are going through. Despite this, liberals and progressives have tended to label the conservative perspective as one that ‘foreclose[s] the possibility of feeling empathy for the “other”’ (Johnson, 2005: 56). But the politics of empathy may not actually be so cut and dry.

After weighing the variety of Enlightenment uses of the term sympathy against its more recent psychological transmogrification into empathy, Lauren Wispé (1986) has offered a useful distinction. She argues that ‘the object of empathy is to “understand” the other person. The object of sympathy is the other person’s “well-being”’ (Wispé, 1986: 318). Similarly, in Misery and Company: Sympathy in Everyday Life (1997), Candace Clark has posited empathy or ‘role-taking’ as merely the first step in a process that can lead to sympathy for the other, but can also lead to indifference or even disgust. This distinction between sympathy and empathy casts doubt on the political potential of the latter. Because sympathy ‘refers to the heightened awareness of the suffering of another person as something to be alleviated,’ it implicitly contains an urge to ‘take whatever mitigating actions are necessary’ (Wispé, 1986: 318). Empathy, by contrast, refers to an attempt ‘by one self-aware self to comprehend un-judgmentally the positive and negative experiences of another self’ (Wispé, 1986: 318). Seen in this light, sympathy is the more explicitly political emotion, in that it necessitates ethical judgment of the conditions and actions of another—Wispé (1986: 319) points out that one could not sympathize with a murderer, but could still seek to empathize with him in order to better understand him and his crime. Furthermore, empathetic understanding is an end in itself, whereas a sympathetic relation to another requires an attempt to help or speak out, much as Boltanski (1999) has described.

Wispé’s particular vision of empathy seems to best describe what the micro-narratives of suffering at these sites are asking of their readers. The messages and images posted at We Are The 99 Percent and We Are The 53% seem to exist in a context where empathetic responses to the suffering of others are taken as the norm, and presumably as a desirable outcome of the kinds of online sharing going on at these micro-blogs. But the fact that such similar tales of economic hardship can be deployed in support of diametrically opposed political causes lends credence to the notion that empathy may be a fundamentally flawed tool for collective political mobilization.

Discourse analysis: We Are The 53%

To better understand these issues, I performed a simple discourse analysis of the micro-narratives of suffering left at the anti-Occupy site We Are The 53% in the month of October 2011. Although the site features images and messages posted in October, November, and December of 2011, and in February of 2012, October was by far the most frequently posted month, coinciding as it did with increased public attention on the Occupy Wall Street protests that began in mid-September. There were three messages posted in February, eight in December, 62 in November, and 503 in October, so I drew my sample from the 503 messages posted to the site in its first month. After an initial unsystematic read-through of many of these messages, I read and coded every other October entry, working down the columns in the site’s archive page (http://the53.tumblr.com/archive), while discarding 18 messages that did not use the format common to the rest of the entries, and thus were not comparable to the larger body of messages.

My initial read-through revealed the existence of three distinct categories of messages on the site, based on three different ways of engaging with suffering and hardship. These three categories were essentially mutually exclusive—if a message contained a story of overcoming hardship it went into one category, if it contained a story of hardship where nothing was overcome it went into another, and if it contained no mention of hardship at all, it went into a third category. These categories I have labeled, respectively: superficial empathy, empathic reversal, and denial of empathy.

While I hope that future researchers will expand and elaborate on these categories in subsequent investigations of the empathetic character of online discourse, I have aimed to make my schema as simple as possible, in the hope of avoiding overlapping categories and decreasing the likelihood of miscoding or misinterpreting messages, as I was the sole coder and could not test for validity or inter-rater reliability. Future studies might use multiple coders and larger datasets drawn from messages at similar websites to correct for this limitation. Analyzing the networks of ‘likes’ and ‘re-blogging’ on such sites might reveal more about what kinds of micro-narratives were most well-received here, and by whom. Future studies might also discover more about the sites’ contributors through participant observation in these digital communities. But although one cannot be sure of the veracity of any individual tales of struggle or success posted to the site, they nonetheless tell us what kinds of biographical narratives and what ways of responding to others’ misfortunes are seen as valid by people who oppose efforts at economic reform and redistribution—these are the primary concerns of the present work.

The first category whose results I will discuss consists of messages exhibiting a denial of empathy for the suffering of others. These messages consisted of exhortations towards protesters to get a job, stop whining, and occasionally in generic tough-love slogans like ‘life is tough, get a helmet’ (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/12034478825). They also occasionally contained tales of individual success in which no hardship, struggle, or suffering was mentioned. However, the messages in this category did not engage in any meaningful way with any of the hardships and struggles common to the current political-economic moment.

The second category consisted of messages that showed some attempt at empathy, but did so in a superficial or flawed way. This superficial empathy resulted in messages that used their authors’ own life stories of overcoming hardship as proof that others could similarly overcome the obstacles facing them. In other words, this was a kind of lazy empathy that asserted something like ‘since I have overcome economic hardships and inconveniences, others must be able to as well,’ without recognizing the many ways in which a similar personal triumph may not be feasible for other individuals.

The third category consists of messages in which authors undertook a kind of empathic reversal. Rather than fully considering the hardship of others, the contributors of these entries relayed their own stories of hardship. Unlike the superficial empathy entries, these messages did not use their authors’ life stories as testaments to the ideal that hard work equates with eventual success, or as a means to invalidate the claims of others. Instead, these entries seemed to simply say ‘I also suffer,’ though their authors refused to make such suffering the basis of claims for government assistance or radical economic change.

The messages were also categorized according to the demographics of those who left them, but only gender was reliably mentioned frequently enough to be valid. Usually the contributors’ user names were easily identifiable as traditional male or female names, and sometimes the messages or pictures made the gender of users with ambiguous screen names apparent. As it happened, the creators of entries in this sample were majority male—63%, compared to 30% female, with another 7% that could not be categorized. Attempts to code the posts for ethnicity and age were less successful, however, as almost half the entries lacked enough clearly identifiable visual or textual clues to be categorized in these terms.

Given that the explicit mission of the site is to counteract the claims of the Occupy movement, only a surprisingly small percentage of entries actually exhibited a full denial of empathy, meaning that they simply did not consider the suffering of others in any recognizable way, nor did they describe their own hardships and so did not appear to ask for others’ empathy to any significant degree. The contributors of these posts, which accounted for 15% of the sample, did not mention the economic obstacles faced by anyone, either others or themselves. In these entries, users posted political messages about the evils of government assistance and the general laziness of those who cannot succeed, occasionally even bragging about their own successes, but never considering the themes of hardship, suffering, and perseverance that played a prominent role in the other entries. Instead, many messages read like this post from a man named ‘Doug,’ who said:

I am 30 years old. I work full time and go to college full time. I pay for what I have. I do not want a handout. I do not want what someone else has worked hard to get. Take responsibility for YOUR OWN ACTIONS! Keep playing those bongos you hippies. OWS you do not speak for ME! I am a 53%’er (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11571090643).

This idea was put more succinctly by another contributor who said ‘I don’t believe in holding up a “tale of woe,” giving the world puppy eyes and expecting them to feel sorry for me and pay my bills. I am the 53%’ (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11325413219/). Another contributor opined ‘Distribute my work ethic, not my wealth’ (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11952522182/). The entries in this category all exhibited a refusal to consider the challenges faced by the un- or under-employed, the differently abled, or those whose race, class, gender, age, or sexual orientation made them vulnerable to social and economic discrimination.

The bulk of the messages at the site did not, however, share the reluctance to engage with suffering evinced by this first category of entries. Instead, messages displaying a sort of superficial empathy appeared with twice the frequency (in 65.6% of the sample) of either of the other two categories. Rather than fully imagining oneself facing the particular hardships of those who posted at We Are The 99 Percent, the contributors of these messages used their own experiences overcoming seemingly similar hardships as evidence that all such difficulties were surmountable. In this way, these contributors used their autobiographical messages in order to invalidate the idea that the kinds of suffering animating the Occupy movement were actually unjust. ‘If I were you,’ these messages seemed to say, ‘I would have overcome the obstacles you faced, and been better for it.’ This seemed to be at least partly what one of the site’s creators, Erick Erickson, had in mind when he initially posted his own brief, handwritten, auto-biographical note, except that very few of these entries adopted the ‘suck it up you whiners’ theme suggested in Erickson’s own entry, or by the motto on the site’s opening page, dedicated to ‘those of us who pay for those of you who whine.’

Instead, the messages exhibiting superficial empathy often took a less judgmental tone. One self-described ‘father of two and grandfather’ explained his own story thusly:

As a family, we’ve been homeless due to a sudden layoff, and without a job for a year. That’s life. It can be tough. I blame no one, I work harder. We made some bad financial choices, we didn’t save, but we learned our weaknesses. Now we support others and run a charity (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11695402513).

Such tales were suggestive of a particular popular-therapeutic conception of suffering as something that offers opportunities for personal growth, as well as potential financial enrichment down the line, rather than as a scandal in and of itself or something requiring broad social change (see Illouz, 2003).

Another contributor relayed a similar message concerning his own experience with unemployment and its eventual transformation into success:

In 2008 I lost my job. I sat at home for a month feeling depressed, defeated, and sorry for myself. Then I had a small business idea that required little start-up investment. My business has been successful—and, what a shocker, I’ve found that my income is a direct result of my hard work… If you are sincere in your desire for happiness, peace of mind, and financial stability, there is only one route that will “buy” this for you—a fighting spirit and hard work. Try it. You’ll be amazed at how great you feel and how wonderful life can become—for you, those you love, and those who need you (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11694247019/).

This contributor made explicit the often unstated assumptions in many of the messages at We Are The 53%, that hard work and perseverance will allow one to overcome any hardship. This particular contributor went so far as to suggest that such hard work was the ‘only one route’ that could achieve these ends. Of course, he failed to consider that even the ‘little start-up investment’ required for his eventually successful small business might still be unavailable to many people less privileged than he, or the many other ways in which his hard work may have dovetailed with his particular form of race/class/gender privilege. Thus this message, and others like it, showcased a complicated relationship with the imagined hardships of others—on the one hand, it offered seemingly sincere, if paternalistic, bits of advice extolling not only the economic value of hard work, but also the emotional and psychological benefits of knowing that one has persevered. On the other hand, the implication that those currently suffering from economic hardships would need such advice suggests that such unfortunates had not already tried working hard or had lacked the ‘fighting spirit’ that would have allowed them to overcome obstacles like unemployment.

Some messages made this idea more explicit. One 49-year-old male explained that although he had ‘an 8^th grade education’ and ‘minor arrests’ in his youth, he had still owned a home for over 20 years with no ‘form of welfare or assistance.’ He asked his audience ‘If I can do it, why can’t you’ (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/12034395917)? This message showcased another version of superficial empathy, in which the contributor’s apparent ease at overcoming a lack of education and a minor criminal record were taken as self-evident proof of others’ ability to do so, if they only set their minds to it. In another similar example, a man named Dan posted a picture of a handwritten sign detailing his life story, which began ‘I grew up broke, My Family was broke—the stepson of a Mexican Farmhand.’ But by the end of his note, Dan explained ‘now, I own over 70 apartments, Commercial buildings, and am Self Employed’ (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11720179173). Dan’s story is noteworthy precisely because it is so exceptional, which he seemed to understand on some level, as he twice mentioned the fact that he had moved to California at age 18 ‘with $33 in [his] pocket.’ And yet the implicit motive in sharing his tale of eventual success is that others might read it as a lesson in the value of hard work and perseverance. One is left to wonder how such an exceptional tale can also be taken as a valid model for others to follow. Many messages on this site exhibited this same tension between the presumed wide applicability of their inspirational stories and the exceptionally long odds that actually made such micro-narratives inspirational in the first place.

A third category of messages, accounting for 16.3% of the posts in the sample, adopted an orientation to suffering and hardship closer to that exhibited by the majority of posts at Occupy’s We Are The 99 Percent site. Rather than refusing to consider economic hardship or suffering at all, or sharing their personal tales of triumph over such obstacles, this final class of entries simply relayed personal tales of misfortune and woe that had not been overcome. These contributors appeared to be mired in many of the same social and economic hardships as the Occupy protesters whose cause they were ostensibly reacting against. Their tales of misfortune were still cast in support of the political economic status quo, though the reasons why were not always clear. In these cases, the response to the suffering of Occupy-supporting protesters seemed to take the form of a simple reply—‘I also suffer.’

For instance, one woman shared her tale of struggling to raise a family during America’s post-9/11 economic downturn. She wrote:

After 9/11 my husband lost his cushy advertising job. We then experienced a series of tragedies, out of our control. This caused us to lose our home and everything of monetary value. For the past 9½ years we have lived (with 3 children) in moderate to extreme poverty. When people have helped us, we experience GRATITUDE not entitlement. We will continue to work hard and make sacrifices necessary. We will NOT give up until we are blessed or we die!!! (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11613403561).

Messages such as this were perhaps as much about the cathartic and therapeutic benefits of sharing one’s pain with an imagined online readership (see Recuber, 2012) as they were explicitly political statements against the Occupy movement, though the privileging of ‘gratitude’ over ‘entitlement’ here was presumably a jab at Occupy protesters.

Another user, a 40-year-old man named ‘Steve,’ shared his feelings about being out of work for the first time in 23 years, and unable to collect unemployment because his own business had failed. He pondered:

I could go downtown and beat on a drum, but that won’t help me earn a job. I could bemoan my lot in life and the thousands I lost in my business venture. But nobody wants to employ a narcissistic person who would rather throw a tantrum at Wall St. than get busy being the captain of their own ship (http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11869689772/).

Both of these entries came from contributors in seemingly bad financial shape, but who remained confident of eventually turning their fortunes around. This confidence appeared to represent some combination of a sincere belief in American meritocracy and a kind of self-oriented pep talk performed in front of an imagined audience with similar political inclinations. In any case, the message’s implicit response to the micro-narratives of misfortune and hardship at We Are The 99 Percent was not to counter the political claims attached to them, but to counter their affective claims on readers’ attention. This empathic reversal, and the larger set of affective relations embedded in all the entries on this site, point to the somewhat muddied political implications of empathy today.

Conclusion: The politics of empathy

The messages analyzed here paint a valuable picture of the ways that opposition to progressive or radical politics gets voiced, even in a time of widespread un- and under-employment, vast disparities in wealth, and an eroding social safety net. Although one cannot know how representative these contributors are of the larger population who chose not to venture online to discuss their ambivalence or antipathy towards Occupy, one sees surprising commonalities between the autobiographical elements of the posts at We Are The 53% and their ideological opponents. Even in their defense of the status quo, the contributors whose stories were analyzed here felt it important to share that they too had suffered through adversities such as unemployment, illness, debt, and unstable family situations. Surely the possibility of other users ‘liking’ their personal micro-narratives provided the impetus for some to post these messages, as such forms of sociality often make up for the lack of monetary rewards seen by most bloggers (see Chia, 2012). Similarly, the frequent re-blogging of stories by other users provided the potential for a therapeutic kind of support or ‘cross-counseling’ that has long been a feature of online communities (see Song, 2004). These motivations were, then, likely quite similar to the motivations of those who shared their micro-narratives of suffering at We Are The 99 Percent as well.

But the different political uses to which such personal accounts of suffering and hardship were put remain important. If empathizing with the suffering of others is ultimately an act of imagination in which one puts oneself in another’s shoes, and tries to feel as the other feels, then this act is open to all the vagaries and self-deceptions that the word ‘imagination’ might imply. It seems that, rather than deeply understanding the often unassailable obstacles posed by a disintegrating economy, insurmountable debt, lack of access to healthcare or education, and discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, the majority of contributors to We Are The 53% used their own life stories of perseverance over economic adversity to imagine that the obstacles faced by others were equally manageable. This site was not, for the most part, filled with the cold denial of empathy that many progressives might have expected. Instead, it demonstrated a flaw of empathy as a political device: though it is quite difficult—maybe impossible—to really feel what others have felt, it seems quite easy to convince oneself that one has done so. Thus, the bulk of contributors to We Are The 53% didn’t deny that the current system causes hardship and suffering, they simply saw all this hardship and suffering through the lenses of their own personal experiences. Their own micro-narratives of suffering came to subsume the considerations of others’ misfortunes, rather than enabling a deeper engagement with those misfortunes and creating a changed perspective as a result.

Such a democratization of perceived adversity necessarily levels the playing field between the privileged and the disadvantaged, since any and all suffering is seemingly created equal. Thus it was likely no coincidence that the contributors examined here skewed overwhelmingly male. While it is impossible to know if those contributors were indeed making good faith efforts to consider the stark economic realities exposed by the Occupy movement before they shared their own responses, it is reasonable to suggest that any movement aiming to change public opinion may be asking too much of even the most well-intentioned bystanders if it requires one to truly feel or understand what others have gone through.

Instead, a much more likely scenario is that the normative demand to empathize with others may be circumvented by the mere performance of this sort of empathy. The term superficial empathy employed here has been used in previous scholarship to describe a style in which nursing home caregivers are encouraged to respond to patients (JOMO, 2013), or as a way that psychotherapists who have not interrogated their own class biases might relate to clients (Guilfoyle, 2009), or as a factor contributing to ethnocentrism (Berkowitz, 1997). And studies have shown that empathy generally only motivates one to offer the most superficial forms of assistance available to those in need (see for instance Neuberg et al., 1997). Thus it makes sense that, as the present work has found, contemporary norms concerning empathy are actually quite compatible with conservative political agendas that are hostile to policies aimed at alleviating suffering and inequality.

This speaks ultimately to the flaw of any progressive or radical politics of empathy—though it may be good for many things, empathy does not provide us with a concrete way of prioritizing pain or hierarchizing hardships. Moreover, it allows us to convince ourselves that we understand what someone else has gone through simply by virtue of the fact that we felt something, though the accuracy of such feeling is fairly impossible to determine. Paul Bloom (2013) has argued similar points in a recent New Yorker essay. He claims that although ‘empathy is what makes us human,’ it ‘betrays us… when we take it as a moral guide’ (2013: 27), and suggests that ‘empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future’ (2013: 29). But perhaps a return to older moral standards associated with sympathy offers a better alternative, since reason alone, as its modern and postmodern critics have long established, is capable of exacerbating misery and inequality as well.

If the micro-narratives of suffering shared by users of both We Are The 99 Percent and We Are The 53% can be recast as potential objects of sympathy, rather than empathy, then the questions one asks oneself upon viewing them are not about what one would do in similar circumstances, and whether that suffering is surmountable or self-inflicted, but simply how such suffering might be alleviated. And if that is the question, then individualistic answers about hard work and perseverance will quickly reveal their inadequacy, as the sheer number of suffering contributors at both sites speaks clearly to the presence of larger social, political, and economic forces at play, and the need for broader efforts at confronting those. What those efforts consist of is still likely to be the subject of much political debate, but the rhetoric of sympathy allows that debate to get closer to some notion of justice, or the greater good, that depends only on knowing that others are suffering, rather than knowing how they suffer. In this somewhat counter-intuitive sense, recognizing that we don’t know what someone else has gone through may be the first step towards actually helping. At the very least, if empathy can so easily serve as an ideological cover for the maintenance of the status quo, then progressives and radicals would do well to encourage alternative ways of relating to the lives and misfortunes of others.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge his students in WRI 128/9 ‘Witnessing Disaster’ during the Spring 2012 semester, who provided feedback on an early draft of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biography

Timothy Recuber is a sociologist who teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University. He studies the emotional content and political implications of mass media, consumption, and digital culture.

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