Empathy, compassion and sympathy.
Empathy is biological, compassion is rational and sympathy comes from experience.
My wife is the most empathetic person I know and, as far as I’ve talked to her about this endless subject, she constantly describes empathy as not what most people think of it. Empathy, according to her, is a perception more than a deliberate action. Being stuck with it for some reason, you are randomly flooded by all kinds of feelings that you know don’t really belong to you, but to random living beings around, human and animal.
There is real scientific support for this description in the theory regarding mirror neurons. And as mirror neurons are very much real, I expect them like any physical attribute to not be spread equally among our species. Some people have more active or simply more mirror neurons and their empathy levels grow accordingly into something that requires training and attention to master properly.
Therefore if empathy is a biological trait, what would less empathetic people have instead? Compassion. There is a heavy handedness of compassion too, because compassion does not occur spontaneously, it is a side effect of an attempt to understand rationally the behaviour of another. It is when we feel like we understand the behaviour of others that we turn to compassion as a means of communication. Compassion is granting the humans around us the right to be themselves.
The last bonding behaviour, sympathy, only appears when we share the experience of the humans around. Only once you have actually, viscerally experienced that which “the other” goes through you can display sympathy or act sympathetically.
But we fake them. We fake empathy, compassion and sympathy everyday.
That’s where your observation becomes relevant. We fake empathy pretending to feel for the others, and actually invading their intimacy. We fake compassion pretending we know the others, and actually attacking their dignity. We fake sympathy, pretending we’ve worn their shoes, and actually stealing their identity.
We fake them because these are the bonding behaviours and no man is an island.