The Only Fact You Need To Know

Persuasion often depends on how an issue is framed: If it’s good v. evil, who wouldn’t want to be on the side of good? And indeed, this is why defendants, historically, have been hated. They harm victims, who are innocent and undeserving of whatever harm is inflicted upon them. As if further proof was needed, look to the most innocent of the innocent, children and pets, who can never be to blame for they are the purist victims possible.

But as any criminal defense lawyer eventually comes to realize, the nearly-impenetrable cloud created by the inherent sympathy for the victim shield is a lie. As easy as it to cast the issue as good v. evil, it informs us of neither of the two questions that still need to be answered: did a crime occur. Did the defendant commit the crime.

When your eyes are clouded by tears for the victim, it can prove impossible to get people to see that these vital questions are unanswered by the presumptions imposed by emotions. How can you doubt that poor victim? For us, it’s the job. For others, we’re just mouthpieces for evil trying to trick them into seeing facts when every iota of their emotions cries in pain for the victim.

Efforts to reframe the question, to promote our basic jurisprudential precepts that have been turned into empty platitudes, such as the presumption of innocence, enjoyed some passing success as the exoneration of innocent, wrongfully convicted defendants, raised awareness of the fact that victims aren’t always victims, that evil defendants aren’t always evil.

Much as we may have enjoyed the exposure of this tiny crack in the belief system, those who benefited from it were less enthralled. Their burden was made harder by the reframing of the issue such that the accused was inherently vilified, presumptively guilty. That meant they had to do more than just point and proclaim guilty, but prove guilt. Proof is hard. Narrative is easy.

And in fairness, there wasn’t always proof even though the crime occurred and the defendant did it. Blackstone’s Ratio may have informed our legal system, but they didn’t care. They openly accepted the fact that some innocents must fry for the sake of victimhood, and they didn’t feel any sympathy for their own victims.

Was it possible to be callous toward victims, even when the victims were the accused? The trick is in the framing. It’s good to have sympathy, empathy. But when it’s for the accused, another word applies.

Mr. Trump is manifesting what I call “himpathy” — the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.

There is a plethora of recent cases, from the Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to the Maryland school gunman Austin Rollins, fitting this general pattern: discussion focuses excessively on the perpetrator’s perspective, on the potential pain driving him or on the loss of his bright future. And the higher a man rises in the social hierarchy, the more himpathy he tends to attract.

This childish made-up word, too cute by half, “himpathy,” would tickle the tears of almost any college sophomore, even though this comes from Kate Manne, a Cornell philosophy professor. But like her disingenuous choice of “recent cases” from the “plethora” available, which ignored the men exonerated after decades in prison for rapes they never committed, or the men falsely accused of rape, she’s playing to those who embrace childish words and notions.

Thus, the bulk of our collective care, consideration, respect and nurturing attention is allotted to the most privileged in our society.

Bet you didn’t know that we care only about powerful men these days. Manne apparently knows more about our feelings than we do, and is here to inform us that if we don’t stop our empathy for the “most privileged,” we are complicit in the harm, partners in the delusion. Her thrust is clear: believe that powerful men are inherently guilty, evil, or you’re indulging in her blight on society,”himpathy.”

It’s a neat trick. Silly, you say? Unavailing? Remember that the average IQ is 100, and half the people fall below it. Remember that many have been groomed to believe, to indulge their emotion to produce the outcomes their hearts desire. The trick here is to reframe the question from accused v. accuser to weak woman v. powerful man.

Other defendants can enjoy freedom from himpathy, as the parties don’t line up by identity. For the poor black man accused of murder, empathy is allowed. But when it’s woman against man, the fix is in. There is no open question, no demand for proof, no sympathy. There’s himpathy. He’s evil and society “inappropriately and disproportionately” feels his pain. You don’t want to be evil, do you?

Once you learn to spot himpathy, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere: in men such as the former editor of The New York Review of Books Ian Buruma, who published a self-indulgent essay by a former Canadian talk-show host accused of sexual assault and harassment by more than 20 women; in women like the five Republicans whom CNN convened recently to voice support for Judge Kavanaugh (“Tell me, what boy hasn’t done this in high school?” asked one, shrugging himpathetically).

There are some who might suggest that the concern isn’t about whether the accuser is a woman, the accused is a man, but whether the facts bear out the accusations, whether allegations withstand scrutiny. If that’s you, then you’re not merely being rational, rejecting the prejudice inherent in the identitarian reframing of the questions that would otherwise demand answers for accusers and accuseds of any other gender. You’re the problem. You’re the evil in society. You’re engaging in “himpathy.”

But, your rational mind asks, what if it turns out that the man didn’t do it, if he’s innocent? Even powerful men can be innocent, you naively say, and can well be the particular targets of false accusations by dint of their high profile.

But we’re in a moment during which himpathy is so thoroughly on display, in such a public way, that the time is ripe to push for a mass moral reckoning.

There can be no wiggle room for facts, for proof, for reason, for logic in this “mass moral reckoning” of himpathy. Your call for facts and logic are merely manifestations of your himpathy, so thoroughly on display that it must be stopped lest we fall into the quagmire of truth. And so the issue would be reframed, and we know without any need for facts who is evil. It’s him. That’s the only fact you need to know.

6 thoughts on “The Only Fact You Need To Know

  1. Richard Kopf

    “Persuasion often depends on how an issue is framed.”
    ____________

    Ladies and Gentlemen,

    Do you know, or have you ever heard, of a any happily married man, in his mid-fifties, with two daughters, who has been forced to disprove an allegation of attempted rape that supposedly took place 36 years ago when the man was 17, where the accuser does not know the place, the month or the year of the assault, where the accuser never uttered a word about it for decades, when it is undisputed that this alleged teenage rapist became an adult with sterling academic credentials and high praise from his professional peers, who advised the President of the United States, who was cleared by six FBI full-field background checks, who literally feeds the poor as a part of his religious faith, who spends his off-hours coaching young girls in sports, and who promotes more women than men to the highest level of his profession while being lauded by scads of women of various ages as a perfect gentleman?

    If you can’t name or conceive of one, then you know in your heart of hearts that my client is not what one woman with no corroboration says he was 36 years ago.
    _____________

    All the best.

    RGK

  2. Rigelsen

    Empathy and sympathy based on group identity or solidarity is wrong… unless it’s my group, or groups I like more.

    There will always be people who think like this, for whom the principle is wholly subjugated to the principal. More depressing than the article itself, however, is the near echo chamber in the commentariat. Both the comments fronted by the NYT as well as those upvoted by the commenters are monolithic in being supportive of the article’s thesis, decrying sympathy, empathy, due process, and even reason for anyone who thinks differently or looks a certain way.

    It’s hard to not be pessimistic about our shared future.

Comments are closed.