I think I have done this one before, but I’ve slept since then it probably bears repeating anyway. I found a fascinating book about evil. It is called “The Science of Evil” and it looks at people would label as sociopaths or psychopaths. The entire premise of the book was that “evil” is what I would lovingly call a “variable absolute.”

The concept of evil is culturally based and therefore almost meaningless on its own. Our enemies become evil, but the fact that we look at the world through a prism of allies and enemies might itself be a sign of distress. So, evil has no useful definition that we can use in a clinical sense. There are certainly individual acts we would all recognize as evil, but if you cannot accurately define it then it is impossible to study it in any significant way.

So what Simon Baron-Cohen (the author of the book) does is look at what traits we commonly see in those people that commit acts that we would commonly recognize as evil. It certainly makes sense. How do you know that someone young has the potential to grow up into a monster?

More importantly, can we change this before it happens? What Baron-Cohen noticed is that people we commonly refer to as evil all have one thing in common. They either have little or no empathy. Good and evil is a hit or miss proposition. Empathy is something we can focus on cultivating. It is something we can teach in our schools, our homes, and houses of worship.

Empathy doesn’t require posting something like the ten commandments. It doesn’t require the imposition of values. It simply requires that we teach young people to see a world outside of themselves. It requires taking those painful moments we all experience and using them to understand when someone else might be going through a similar moment.

As hard as we might try, there are some people that are too psychologically damaged to learn empathy. I have a masters degree in counseling, but I haven’t done the research like Baron-Cohen. I couldn’t tell you if that is a failure on our part or if someone is destined never to learn it. I certainly think there are plenty of anecdotal examples on both counts.

What we can do is prioritize empathy in leadership positions. We cannot force everyone to have empathy, but at least we can incentivize it. We can make sure that the leader of the free world, our schools, places of business, and everything in between are caring people. It is a basic test we used to pass with great regularity. It is a basic test we have failed in recent decades.

When we don’t prioritize empathy we hurt ourselves in multiple ways. First and foremost, when we have leaders that lack empathy, they are unable to make decisions that consider the feelings and well-being of those in their organization. Decision are self-serving and therefore only benefit the leader and those that happen to have the same needs.

The secondary consideration might be the more long-term reason. If I want to be a leader I will model myself after the leaders that I know and respect. If the leaders I know have no empathy then I will think it is okay not to have any empathy. I will think that is the proper way to be a leader. In other words, empathy isn’t an added bonus, but a prerequisite.

Empathy keeps us from hurting people physically and psychologically. Some might label that as a conscience or moral compass. In reality it is empathy. We understand it because we can imagine it being done to us. Empathy is basic, but we can’t take it for granted. More and more people lack it and more and more people don’t seem to mind.