What Do We Do When Someone in Power Has No Empathy?

by George Cassidy Payne

1577 words

In my work as a trauma-informed counselor and nonviolence educator, I often encourage people to reach across differences and listen to those whose views challenge their own. Someone usually asks a harder question: What if the person we are trying to reach has no empathy at all?

It is one thing to encourage dialogue. It is another to keep reaching toward someone who seems unmoved by the suffering their decisions cause. What if they have no interest in understanding us? What if they understand our concerns perfectly well and simply do not care?

These questions are pressing, particularly when we are dealing with people who hold political, economic, or institutional power. We can try to understand another person’s perspective and invite them to reconsider their choices. We cannot make them listen or manufacture concern on their behalf. When conversation fails, we need other ways to respond.

It helps to recognize that empathy takes different forms.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another person’s perspective. We can ask what experiences shaped their views and what assumptions inform their decisions. Understanding someone does not mean agreeing with them. It gives us a clearer sense of whom we are trying to reach and whether further conversation might help.

Affective empathy involves sharing in or responding emotionally to another person’s experience. We might feel another person’s grief or recognize their fear, even when they show little interest in our own feelings. Such responses can deepen our emotional awareness, but feeling another person’s pain does not guarantee compassionate action.

Some writers also describe somatic empathy, the body’s response to another person’s experience. We might tense up when we see someone injured or feel our stomach tighten when we witness suffering. These reactions can precede conscious thought, although a physical response alone does not tell us how well we understand another person’s experience.

Understanding, feeling, and acting are distinct capacities. Someone can recognize another person’s suffering without caring about it. Someone can even understand another person’s vulnerabilities well enough to exploit them. Empathy can inform our choices, but it does not determine them.

When we are talking about people in positions of power, their private feelings matter less than the consequences of their decisions. We can spend years trying to understand what motivates a leader, an employer, or an institutional authority while the harm continues.

So what can we do?

First, we can make a good-faith effort to understand before deciding how to respond. Ask a genuine question. Listen for the experiences and assumptions behind the person’s position. Acknowledge what we can honestly recognize without pretending to agree. If the conversation reveals an opening, we can build on it.

We should also pay attention to what happens next. Does the person engage honestly? Do they acknowledge the consequences of their choices? Are they willing to consider evidence or change course? If they repeatedly dismiss our concerns or use our openness against us, we can stop trying to persuade them. We do not have to keep repeating a conversation that has become an obstacle to action.

Second, we can name the harm. Identify the decision, describe its consequences, and ask what will be done to address them. We do not need to establish what another person feels internally before evaluating what they have done. A policy can cause harm whether its author feels compassion or indifference. Misconduct can be addressed whether the person responsible regrets it or not.

Understanding why someone acts as they do may help us respond effectively. It does not excuse their behavior or erase its consequences.

Third, we can establish boundaries and protect those being harmed. We do not owe endless conversations to someone who humiliates, threatens, or abuses us. We can leave an unsafe exchange, or refuse to participate in something harmful. When direct confrontation could increase the danger, getting help or making a safety plan may be the wiser response.

Empathy is something we can choose to extend. It is not an obligation to keep giving our attention to someone who repeatedly uses it against us. Understanding another person is an opportunity, not a debt we must continually pay.

Fourth, we can find others and work together.

When someone holds power over us, our ability to influence them individually may be limited. Collective action gives us other possibilities. If an elected official ignores constituents, people can organize, contact representatives, attend public meetings, and work through the political process. If an institution refuses to address misconduct, people can document what is happening, seek appropriate oversight, build coalitions, and press for change.

The person causing harm does not have to be persuaded to care before anything can improve. We can change the conditions under which harm occurs, even when we cannot change the person responsible.

Our responsibilities also differ according to our positions. Someone with little power may need allies, protection, and a way to be heard. Someone entrusted with authority has a greater responsibility to consider the consequences of their decisions and remain accountable. Asking both people simply to practice more empathy overlooks the imbalance between them.

We can remain open to the possibility of change without making ourselves responsible for producing it. People do reconsider their views. A conversation that appears unproductive today may matter much later. But change may never come. We can offer opportunities for understanding without tying our well-being or our pursuit of justice to another person’s willingness to accept them.

History offers powerful examples of what happens when people stop making progress dependent on the goodwill of those who hold power.

Consider the American Civil Rights Movement. When Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, her refusal to surrender her bus seat helped catalyze a boycott that lasted 381 days. The organizing work of the Women’s Political Council, particularly Jo Ann Robinson, was crucial to mobilizing the community. Black residents organized carpools, walked long distances, endured intimidation, and sustained the boycott at considerable personal cost. Martin Luther King Jr. became a prominent leader alongside countless local organizers whose work made the protest possible.

The boycott did not depend on persuading every segregationist to empathize with Black passengers. It challenged segregation through organized resistance and sustained community effort. The broader movement helped build the conditions for landmark civil rights legislation.

In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

His words remind us that our responsibility extends beyond our immediate experience. We do not have to suffer a particular injustice ourselves to recognize its significance or help confront it.

India’s independence movement offers another example. Mahatma Gandhi helped lead campaigns of nonviolent resistance against British colonial rule. Boycotts, noncooperation, and civil disobedience challenged imperial authority, while other leaders and communities pursued independence through different strategies. The movement involved decades of struggle and competing visions of India’s future. Independence came in 1947, amid the tragedy of Partition.

In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi wrote, “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree…” His observation offers an important caution: how we pursue change helps shape what we build, even when the outcome remains uncertain.

Neither movement succeeded through empathy alone. Both required organization and sustained pressure. The people involved could not wait for everyone in power to recognize their suffering. They challenged institutions and worked to make injustice more difficult to maintain.

Concern for human dignity can motivate resistance. Organizing and collective action give that concern a way to operate in the world.

There is also a danger in turning empathy into a demand we place on everyone, especially those who have already been harmed. We should not ask a person experiencing abuse to keep trying to understand their abuser. We should not tell people facing discrimination that their first responsibility is to understand the prejudices directed at them. Their safety and dignity do not depend on doing so.

Empathy can also be selective. We may find it easier to understand people whose experiences resemble our own, feeling deeply for those we identify with while overlooking suffering outside our communities. Our emotional responses do not always tell us whose needs are greatest or what justice requires.

That is why empathy needs to work alongside principles and an honest examination of consequences. We need to listen to people whose experiences differ from ours, especially those directly affected by decisions made in their name. We also need institutions capable of protecting people when individual goodwill fails.

For me, reaching across differences means refusing to reduce people to caricatures while remaining honest about the consequences of their choices. It means listening without surrendering my judgment and recognizing when a conversation has become harmful or futile.

When someone in power appears to have no empathy, we can try to understand them. We can also recognize when understanding has reached its limits. We can name the harm, protect those affected, seek allies, and organize for change. We can leave room for dialogue without waiting indefinitely to be heard.

We may never know whether the person we are challenging has the capacity to care about our suffering. We do not have to settle that question before deciding what needs to happen next.

Empathy can help us recognize what is wrong. Courage can help us confront it. Working together can help us change the conditions that allow it to continue.

We may not change the person in power. We can still limit the harm and build something better.

~~~~~

George Cassidy Payne, M.A., M.T.S., syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Rochester-based writer whose work sits at the intersection of politics, ethics, and lived experience. A poet, philosopher, and 988 crisis counselor, he covers issues of democracy, justice, and community resilience.