The Ten Types of Human: A New Understanding of Who We Are, and Who We Can Be

by Dexter Dias

How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood? Is it possible for freedom and independence to arise in new ways under new conditions? Philip K. Dick

However, evolution has not equipped us with a limitless capacity for empathy. That is because feeling other people’s pain comes at a cognitive cost. We have limited bandwidth. There is only so much cognitive load we can carry, only so much processing of other people’s pain our mental module can do. All the same, we can partially insulate ourselves from the emotional burn by seeking the analgesic of reward on offer when we adopt a compassionate stance towards other people in pain. We can, after all, get something back.

It means we can politely acknowledge the defeatism that surrounds vast social justice issues like human trafficking and child slavery, and put it to one side. Alexander Pope famously wrote that to err is human. Perhaps. But the research in this section suggests that to care also is, in the sense of feeling the pain of other human beings. It’s just that it costs. We should not pretend that it does not. Nor should we confuse hesitations and misgivings with signs of weakness, moral or otherwise. It’s just our mind doing the maths. Perhaps we cannot entirely overcome the world. But we can engage with it in a meaningful way so that it does not overcome us.