For centuries now, believers in God have offered thoughts and prayers to their fellow men and women during times of suffering. It was always a means of showing empathy; and asking our creator for a swift relief and recovery from the difficulties faced. That empathy was almost universally taken as a good thing on all sides: The sender actively wishing for others to receive relief from the pain and suffering; the receiver getting the emphatic love, sympathy, and support of others; and the observers saw both the good-intentioned people reminding the distraught that they are not alone, and the limited relief that provides as making life marginally better. In the shadow of tragedy, it isn’t much, but it is something in the right direction.

Only recently, say within the last decade if memory serves correctly, has this arrangement changed. Now, the phrase is viewed negatively by a growing number of people; morphing it from its emphatic form and into something resembling its complete opposite. Even though the empathy is genuine in the vast majority of cases, it is taken as fake. In the best cases it is seen as nothing more than mere virtue signaling. The worst cases depend on the tragedy, but recent examples show they have been taken as anything from being uncaring and dismissive, to the intentional avoidance of the policy debates or actively resisting would-be corrective actions. To simplify, offering thoughts and prayers is viewed as selfish instead of selfless.

Once someone becomes committed to judging others as operating under a sinister, ulterior motive without any proof, it is not hard to jump straight into declaring them villains. Of course, this is not limited to just judging the merits of people extending their thoughts and prayers. Thanks to similar views in other areas, and a media that focuses the vast majority of its content production to tragedies and negativity, people have started believing that the majority of people around them are genuinely sinister. Holding a door open for someone else is increasingly viewed as demeaning. Offering help, even at times when it is asked for, is often viewed as if the helpers want only the proximity that providing help naturally gives in order to find opportunities to be abhorrently evil. It has become almost trendy to assume the worst, especially if it involves anyone we don’t personally know or like. This whole mess has built a destructive cycle that fosters tensions, built on largely unfounded fears of generally good people being downright evil.

Such views, if generally held throughout our society, do much more to hinder societal cohesion and destroy individual peace than the acts of evil do. FDR had it right:

“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

What is even more disturbing is that some have admitted, albeit indirectly, that they do not wish for tragedies to not have transpired, but that they would have happened in manners that enable the tragedy to be used to support and push their narratives.

Two examples can be derived from recent events. The first is the Jussie Smollett case, where a gay young may staged a hate crime attack against himself garnered many individuals to use the event to paint the nation as evil, and the use that narrative to push agendas. When the police reports revealed the whole ordeal was faked, admissions of frustration began to pour out on social media. People admitted they wanted the attack to be true so they could portray the event as an example of a commonplace trend, usually orchestrated by a group they wanted to vilify.

The second example came from New Zealand, where a white supremacist shot and killed 50 people just before St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Here the examples were a little different because the tragedy was real, but the act was the same. Instead of wishing the event never happened, people wished that the perpetrator was a member of a specific group. Then, they could portray the perpetrator’s evils as commonplace or acceptable to that group. Political pundits on both sides assigned the shooter to an opposing party. Atheists tried to call the attacker Christian or Jewish in order to portray the religions themselves as evil. Capitalists, citing the manifesto, grouped him with socialists and communists, and vice versa. All of this is done to associate and vilify groups of people, unjustly casting them as evil, which is an evil act itself.

So essentially, we have an very small minority of people committing heinously evil acts, feeding a growing population of people that use those acts to commit the less evil act of vilifying large groups, which in turn motivates and incentivizes more heinously evil acts. Luckily, the people that object to empathy are still a minority. Still, it’s a good idea to stand your up for those who are genuinely emphatic and use reason to break the cycle when you can. If left unchecked, this will probably not end well.