The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society
By J.D Trout
(Viking Adult)





In The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society, J.D Trout aims to use the findings of social and cognitive psychology to “design personal decision strategies and social policies aimed at making our lives better.” In the first half of the book he explains the various ways in which humans are deeply flawed creatures chronically incapable of making decisions that are in line with their own self-interest. After presenting ways to overcome this, the real solution, he argues in the second half of the book, is an aggressively interventionist government focused on creating political structures and social policies that will prevent people from making the irrational decisions they are prone to make. Psychological research, Trout seems to think, has validated most of the tenets of social democracy.

Among Trout’s suggestions is an amendment of the constitution in order to outlaw poverty and ways to increase direct citizen participation in public affairs. If the “good society” promised in the subtitle sounds a tad utopian, he simply retorts that “there is nothing utopian about a government that is aggressively humane.” Readers vaguely acquainted with the carnage that was the 20th century will understand the implications of that statement. That the road to oppression and misery is often paved with good intentions, completely escapes him; the same is the case with the fundamental contradiction implicit in his supreme trust in governmental policies created by the irrational beings he describes in the first half of the book.

Luis Daniel Caridad