He describes a phenomenon called psychic numbing, loosely defined as the larger the number of suffering people, the more apathy.
So is the problem not enough empathy, or empathy itself?
*
Samson DeWitt （now Felix） descends the stairs behind Simon, with his sister, Bathsheba （now Katie）。 In front of them, Randall Flagg stands weaponless in bare feet, blinking at the snowy peak of Mount Denali. He will bury his rifles in the dirt, he decides. Starting today he will fight no more.
Nearby, Story Burr-Nadir holds her brother’s hand. Hadrian, too, looks up at the mountains, but in his mind are different words. He thinks, This is a place we can heal. He spent six days locked in a hotel room in Washington DC eating energy bars and watching the world end on TV, before his sister and her friends came to rescue him. He looks over at her now, squinting at the wildflowers, and smiles.
“You and me,” she tells him, and he nods, because what else is there?
Duane Yamamoto comes up behind Simon and takes his hand. They are pioneers, who will sleep on the plane until their homes arrive. They will eat the food they’ve brought until they can lay in provisions. There is one phone between them, which they’ve agreed to use only in case of emergencies.
Last out, the Prophet Paul descends the nose stairs and kneels in the loam. He bends forward and kisses the mossy ground, thanking God for delivering them here to the new promised land.
Is that what happened? Simon wonders. Or did we deliver ourselves?
As with everything else about God, where you come down on the issue revolves around faith.
*
As a writer, your author has long believed that fiction is an empathy delivery device. He believes that if, on the page or the screen, a writer can make you, the reader, care about someone who is not you, you will go out into the world with a broadened empathy for others. And that this will make the world a better place.
Consider this, however.
Empathy, like any emotion, can be manipulated. Isn’t that what I’ve just described? An author writing a story to produce feelings? Empathy, therefore, is a tool that can be used for good, or for ill. As Adam Smith once wrote, to feel empathy for someone who has been wronged is to feel anger or hatred toward those who’ve wronged them. So if I want to make you angry, I just paint you a picture of a poor victim and the person or people who abused or manipulated them.
Help the victim, I might say, but also punish the victimizer.
Say I told a large group of people a story that they themselves are victims—of manipulation by dark forces, of disdain by people they’ve never met, of being left behind like a dog on the side of the road—what would those people do to help themselves and punish those they believed had abused them? For who among us doesn’t empathize first and foremost with themself?
*
There were 3,478,769,962 people alive on Planet Earth the year I was born. There are 7,794,798,739 today. In my lifetime, 4.3 billion extra people have come to live with us here on this shimmering blue-green ball. Babies with parents. Human beings who need food and water, homes, and schools, who generate waste and drive cars and have babies of their own.
It’s possible we haven’t thought this thing through all the way. There’s no denying that an individual person, after millions of years of evolution, is a very efficient problem solver. But what he or she can reliably solve is their own individual problem, perhaps—for a select few—the problems of a community bigger than a city, but smaller than a country. And yet, at some point, our ability to solve a problem breaks down when the size of the problem grows too big.
This inability is made worse by the fact that, as discussed, our motivation to solve each other’s problems drops when their numbers grow too big. And yet, the dilemma, in this case, is not the babies. Babies are wonderful. The problem is that there is a scale differential between the number of people on Earth and our ability （and desire） to solve their problems.
Think about it like this: When two parents give birth to a third child, they start using sports analogies. They say, Now we have to play zone defense, by which they mean they’re outnumbered and can no longer maintain a one-on-one approach to their children.
So what if a family had ten children, or thirty children, or a hundred children? At a certain point, their ability to solve their problems would break down. The best they could hope for would be survival.
Which, as we know, is the lowest standard of living.
*
How is the book going to end? my daughter asked me again yesterday. It’s important to her that everything turns out okay. It’s important to me, too.