The Empathic War

The self-insert and its consequences have been a disaster for literature and the human race.

I live and I have sympathy. I’m dead. and I have empathy.

In the first essay of this series, I introduced multiple threads on why it difficult if not impossible for a new literature to emerge. However, one that I did not directly mention there is the problem of empathy. It is pernicious concept that has contaminated every inch of our society and has much to do with why so much modern '“literature” is incapable of rising above mediocrity and to become something truly visionary.

Empathy is closely related to one of the central aspects of wishfulfilment media. Something I have named: “the self-insert”. The essay below will first be an explanation of what the self-insert is. Followed by how it is linked to the cult of empathy and ending with a brief pondering on how both effect the modern writer and literature.

Wish fulfillment in the self-insert

Popular media is plagued with the self-insert, sometimes known as the “literally me” phenomenon. This is often confused with larping, but it’s its opposite. Larping is when you play a character and become someone else. During it you are someone else and sometimes, if you do it hard enough, you become (partly) what you larp as. The self-insert works the opposite way. You project yourself on the characters and by doing so, those characters become an extension of yourself. There is little to no separation between you and the characters. If the character gets hurt, you get hurt. If the character feels joy, you feel joy. You start living your life through those characters. For women, Femgooner romance novels are one of the clearest and most destructive examples of the self-insert. For men, the Harem Isekai genre is a striking example.

The vampiric curse

The most powerful and influential femgooner series of the 21^st century is without a doubt the Twilight saga by Stephany Meyer. I highly discourage people to read it. It is horribly written, boring beyond belief. It is just bad for you, but if you are a brave soul and want to understand ground zero for femgooner romance novels as a modern mass phenomenon then you have to be familiar with it. You can also watch the films and save much time.

Bella, the main character, is little described in the books and if she is, she comes over as quite bland. This is very much done on purpose. It makes it so that the broadest amount of people can easily identify with that person. Bella is for the same reasons a very passive person. She was able to attract and make a monster obsess over her by not doing anything. She has no virtues, nothing higher that makes her life something worthy of emulation or of getting the “boy”. She is nothing but a blank slate for the female audience to project themselves onto and imagine themselves in a relationship with “the boy” and gaining the perfect life.

Twillight is of course a lot milder than this, but it perfectly sets the stage for the more deranged stuff.

This is the core reason why romance novels are so popular with and so destructive for women. Life is no longer lived in their own body, but trough the imaginary bodies of the (female) characters. This makes women passive, but femgooner novels also increase female narcissism. In the femgooner novel, there is only room for the I. Everything becomes an extension of the ego and must be turned to the wishes of the self-inserted reader. In such books there is no room for a “bad” or a truly painful ending. There is no place for struggle and tragedy. Reading such books does not lead to change and growth. When the spell of the romance novel ends. The woman returns to the real world. Where she has nothing going for her. Where no vampire will take her away from her dreary life. She screams in despair and becomes even more bitter and spiteful. 

My uwu harem of anime girls

There are many a different kinds of male self-insert media, but one of the most striking examples is the harem isekai genre. Isekai, Nippon for another world, is a genre of novels where the protagonist is transported to another (fantasy) world. Usually, the main character is defined by mediocrity and dies in the real world in a very banal way. Most often, he is killed by a truck. The main character escapes the real world by no effort of his own, but when he enters that new world, he is usually given special powers. These powers quite often include the ability to attract multiple women to him, hence the Harem part in the title of this genre.  In the real world, the main character was passive, but now in this new world, he becomes an active vessel for change. By his granted special powers or by cheating with this Earthly knowledge, he quickly becomes very powerful and with little effort he is able to conquer his new world while getting all the girls.  

These novels are written is such a way that the main character is forgettable and comes from mediocre origins. He is an everyman. The protagonist becomes a vessel that the reader projects all his desires onto and then imagines he lives that life trough that main character. He is powerful and respected. He destroys all the bullies and has all the girls fall head over hiels in love with him. He conquers…. at least until he turns the last page of the book.

Isekai Harem novel and any type of self-insert media is destructive for the active and living man. They do not open the readers eyes to new ways of thinking and being. They don’t confront him with the pain of the world. The male consumer falls into a false activity. One where he imagines he lives a life of a powerful man, but when putting down his phone, he stares at the grey walls of his room. Sighing that he must soon go to bed and rise early to wage his day away, stuck in a dead-end job.

Non-life

Femgooner and Isekai novels are two examples of media where the self-insert is particularly strong and central to its appeal, but other media like video games, TV series, movies etc. have, depending on the particular product, a strong self-insert aspect. Pornography in particular is built on the self-insert and contrary to the screeching of feminists and tradcons. It is this self-inserting and the resulting fake activity that makes porn so destructive for men. The only difference between pornography and other self-insert media is one of degree and not of kind.

 Part of the reason why self-insert media is so popular in this day and age is quite obvious. We live in a very passive and stifling world. People feel their passivity very strongly. One of the ways to pretend to escape it is to consume media that allows us to pretend for a moment that we live in a world where we are free from these chains and our desires can be fulfilled. One should have sympathy for those who consume such media, but in the end, it is a palliative that prevents us from taking our lives into our own hands and live a life worth living.

Gloriously larping

As already stated, Larping is the opposite of the self-insert. When you larp, you become someone else. You leave behind your own self and pretend, for a time, to be someone or something else. When a child dresses up as a knight. He cease to be a child. For that whole afternoon the child is truly is a knight. He embodies the virtues and vices of the knight. By doing so he comes to understand the knight. If the larp is particularly successful the child might (after his mother calls him home for cookies and glass of milk) integrate certain aspects of the knightly virtue into his life.

However, larping doesn’t have to be the total abandonment of the child caught up in his imagination. You are also larping when you see a man of great virtue and try to emulate him. You see that someone else has something you don’t have and try to gain if for yourself by becoming, even if a little bit, like that great person. This is the vital difference between larping and self-inserting. When you self-insert you take the person that you are as sufficient. You are no longer someone that has to grow, but someone who is perfect and deserves all his desires. The larper is struggling to become something more. Larping can of course be dangerous. Adults shouldn’t do it with the reckless abandon of children. You can also always larp as something evil. Afterall, not all examples are good.

There are also limits to it. No matter how hard a modern man larps as a great men of ancient days, he will never be one, for that era has passed and will not return, but this doesn’t take a way from its productive power. Where would we be if Caesar did not larp as Alexander the Great and Napoleon not as Caesar?

All great men were larpers btw

The troon

Understanding the danger of the self-insert is a key that helps us understand many pathologies of the modern world. A prime example of this, is the Troon. At first sight one might think that larping is the cause of troonification. Afterall, doesn’t the troon pretend to be a woman? But this isn’t the case. The troon doesn’t pretend to be a women. No, he imagines himself as a women. The crucial difference lies in this “imagines himself as”. To “pretend to be” would be like a male actor playing a woman in a play. During the play the actor is a woman and not a man. He is not even himself, but the character. When the play ends, he returns to being himself. This acting does leave traces behind in the actor and might in time cause problems for the actor, but the important difference is that the actor does not think that he is a women, the troon, however, does.¹

The troon is not leaving himself behind to become a different person. He is trying to insert himself into “a woman”. He is John, but “a woman”. He is trying to shape an idealized sense of “woman” into an extension of himself. This is the cause of the often extremely stereotypical way MtF dress and behave themselves. They want to signal to the world that they are a woman. They only care about being recognized as a woman. When a normal person sees trough their charade, the troon gets violent. He has been found out. This denial damages the ego of the troon. When you self-insert that what you self-insert into becomes an extension of your ego. This is the same reason why people, especially women, get mad at authors when they kill off a their beloved characters. The women were living part of their lives trough those characters and with their deaths a part of themselves died. It is also with the troon when you deny him. 

I do not deny that there are other causes to troonification like hormones and plain old indoctrination, but the prevalence of the self-insert popular media is a potent vector that makes people more susceptible to becoming a troon and trooning out. Self-inserting and the vector it opens for modern diseases like troonification, is not only caused by media. The foundation for these diseases comes from the “cult of empathy”.

The cult of empathy

Empathy is the moral prerogative of our day. In school, at work and in the movies it is preached with great fervor. All must bow down its power. Those who do not feel “enough” empathy, are reviled and send to the therapist for reconditioning.

Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself walking a mile in the shoes of someone else. You are inserting yourself into that persons life and imagining to live in the other person and experience what he experiences. The advocates of empathy will claim that this makes you more human. That this will lead to more “love” and “kindness”. That with empathy comes understanding of the other and an abandoning of the self. That when you have empathy you open your mind to new perspectives. This seems like a good thing. You try to understand the views of the other and when you understand those views you can take that into account when you act. The man with empathy will be more caring and “human” because now he can “feel”.  But in actuality nothing of the sort happens. It is an extreme form of narcissism.

When you have empathy, you project yourself onto the other and the other becomes an extension of your own ego. It’s no longer the pain or joy of the other that stands at the center, but your own. You do not let the other be himself, a person that stands on his own. You delude yourself in thinking that after “walking in his shoes” you understand that person. To understand a person is an exercise of careful reasoning build upon intuition drawn from experience.

In such a careful exercise, you can figure out the reasons and motivation for why a person acted a certain way, but you don’t delude yourself in thinking that you can experience indirectly what the other did and generate the same feelings. The feelings generated are wholly your own. The empathic attempt becomes an act of narcissism. You saw this quite clearly when European shitlibs where using “empathy” to import millions of “refugees” into Europe. “Can’t you feel all the suffering they must be feeling!!!! I have an empty room where I can have one of those poor people stay!!!” said the woman. But there was no understanding and no true care. If there was understanding they would have realized, that they aren’t like us and if there was care, they wouldn’t have supported the Arab Spring. The only thing these women cared about, was to look good to their fellows and to be filled with happy feelings of moral righteousness. This is what empathy practically turns into. Nothing but a vehicle for personal emotional satisfaction. “See, see I’m feeling the good feelings! I’m a moral person!”

Empathy in all its glory

Suffer not the empath to live

Empathy is a concept coined in the 20^th century and has mostly replaced the previous concept of compassion or sympathy. Compassion has its origins from Latin, meaning: “to suffer with”. Suffering doesn’t only mean having pain, but more generally means to undergo.  The concept of compassion is much distrusted and seen as inferior in modern psychobabble circles. Compassion lacks the living in aspect of empathy.

You aren’t pretending to feel what the other person feels. You do not try to understand his pain. Because, how can you?  You have never experienced the lose of a dear brother in battle or child lost in child birth. And even if you did, he is still someone else, a mind you don’t have access too. But when you see the pain in your friends eyes, you can stand next to him and suffer with him. You are ready to help to bare his burdens. This however is seen as insensitive and sometimes even as evil by the cult of empathy. Usually the argument is that you are less “connected” with the person you feel compassionate for then you would be if you felt empathy for him. When a friend is in pain. You run to his aid because he is a friend. Seeing him in pain causes you pain for you love him. You don’t run to his aid from some sense of “empathy” with his situation. Love isn’t empathy, empathy prevents love.

It is clear that empathy is a from of self-insertion. When you feel empathy you imagine yourself living in that other person. You appropriate his feelings for your own. Like the self-insert media it makes you passive. You start imagining living as an other person. It draws you away from action and as explained earlier, it leads to an increase in narcissism. Like self-insert media, it conditions you to be a passive slave. Empathy is the “virtue” the weak man adores because it frees him from all need for action.

Now, empathy can be useful in limited situations. It can be used to gain an understanding of what you would do in the same situation someone else experienced, but this doesn’t teach you anything about the other person. The worship of empathy is ironically one of the if not the reason why shitlibs are so incapable of understanding people and cultures that are (radically) different from themselves. Women not understanding Islamic “refugees” is one pertinent example, but the general incapability of shitlibs to understand why people are on the right, is long term a more dangerous one. They can’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to be a: “freaking hecking decent human being like I am!!!!”. All must be like the shitlib. The only response they have to resistance, is to destroy and then indoctrinate its remnants. The intolerance of the Leftists comes from the incapability to see that something can exist that is radically outside of its own point of view. In contrast, the righteous intolerance of the Right comes from the understanding that those points of view do exist and have to be mediated, if not outright exterminated. Afterall, we believe that evil, lies and ugliness exist. That the Good, the True and Beautiful must be victorious in the end.

The death of literature

The question concerning empathy goes to the heart of the problems we have today. The focus on empathy is one way the GAE, GNC, the Longhouse or whatever name or acronym you prefer, keeps us enslaved. Its commandments are taught in every classroom. It turns men weak and passive. It causes women to joyfully invite parasites into our nations. It destroys any chance for true understanding of another person and is a prime factor in many other ills of our age. But it also it also makes its victims incapable of writing a new literature. This question remains the central focus of this substack.

The cult of empathy traps you into a self-referential world and makes it impossible for you to see beyond your own horizon. It leads to people being only capable to write self-insert slop where the writer turns the characters into idealized reflections of himself or who he wished he was. There is no exploration of the human condition of society or the Divine. Only the idiosyncratic life of the author. The reader is also not innocent. Instead of reading (old) literature that elevates him. He only reads what sooths him. To let his fantasies run wild without it transforming him into someone more.

Both the reader and the writer are conditioned by the cult of empathy to be receptive to this kind of media. Empathy becomes the primary way you relate to the world and so media has to reflect and reinforce that. It becomes a vicious cycle that ends in a deeper and deeper passivity.

Conclusion

Literature can and should entertain, but it should also teach and elevate. To write this new literature, we have to do away with empathy. Only by doing this, we can open ourselves up again to the suffering of life and move beyond ourselves to see the world as it is. To understand and from this understanding envision a new way forwards, a new horizon to inspire us to action.

1. This way of things gives us a way to distinguish crossdressing from troonism. Crossdressing is more a kin to larping. It is still bad, but allows us to see it as two related but still different phenomena. This distinction between self-insert and larping also allows us to distinguish furries (larping) from otherkin (self-insertion).