The practice of empathy
An interesting way to practice empathy is to take someone’s behavior that we judge as “irrational” and create a number of possible scenarios that would solidly explain the logic of that behavior. It works because that’s exactly what we do when we extend empathy to people whose logic we know and understand.
What we often discover in the process is that we actually don’t know what logic supports what we consider irrational. We discover that any of our scenarios might actually be valid.
The practice is based on the observation that all irrational behavior is supported by certain logic that is usually flawed yet totally compelling to the person directed by that logic.
Stated differently: we always we do the only thing we can based on our logic at the time - even when that logic is totally flawed.
