Here is C’s response to the latest prompt:
“Can you truly understand someone whose suffering you’ve never experienced, or is empathy always a kind of fiction?
Besides the fact that I don’t think you can ever truly understand someone else, I don’t think shared experience is necessary for the empathy you feel towards someone. No matter how many similar experiences you have, how much time you spend together, how many deep conversations you have, you can never truly get inside someone’s brain. You can never truly know someone. Sure with some people you can get really close to it, but I think it’s impossible to truly understand someone. You can only know them through your own eyes or the version they present to you. But I don’t think just because you don’t truly understand someone that empathy is a fiction. Maybe since the lack of understanding is innate, that’s just what empathy is. It may sound a little painful that people will never really know you, so their empathy may be on a different level than the empathy you may wish to experience from someone else, but I don’t think this totally scraps empathy to fiction. I think that’s just what empathy involves, or doesn’t involve. Empathy takes openness and dedication and heart. Sure knowledge and experience may aid in your empathy but I don’t think it’s at the core of it. And above all of it I don’t think empathy can ever be a fiction
Robert Hiraeth 