The Math of Empathy: What and How We Count Matters

Math is the most universal of languages and, some would say, it’s like postcards from the grand designer of it all. Take pi, for instance. Come on! 3.14159 etc.

The math of the grand design is mind-blowing, especially as you look out into the universe or deeper and deeper into the way our world is organized. Crystals. DNA. The periodic table. Sometimes we get confused and think this is all our doing. It’s not. We didn’t invent any of it, but we can marvel at and learn from the order of it all.

The math we invented was much simpler. We first started counting around the time of the agricultural revolution. Addition. Subtraction. Accounting. Simple stuff, but a big shift, nonetheless. Instead of existing in a fog together, we became specialized and started valuing certain things and jobs and time more than others. Doing so separated us more than it brought us together, but since empathy is selfish first, it was a necessary step.

What’s the math of the industrial revolution? How many widgets can 30 people make if lined up production-style for 10 hours a day? Products. Of. Multiplication. Productivity speeding up. More things with fewer people. More stuff in less time. We call that efficiency, but human connectivity and empathy took a back seat. Now, the possibility of abundance sets the table for cooperation at a grander scale. The technological revolution brought us to exponential math. Moore’s law.

Faster, and faster, but still entropic growth. Greater possibilities for physical abundance and global connectivity, setting the table for including emotional variables.

So, what’s next? What happens when the math of entropy gives way to the math of empathy? Remember fractals? Growing infinitely from the inside out? Maybe we’ve been incomplete in our view of math until now. We’ve been optimizing physical resources, but the function we should be optimizing is time spent increasing the only resource on earth that is infinite — empathy. Maybe we should take some clues from nature and find this kind of resonance in our civilization as well. Fractals are networked. Fractals are inclusive. Fractals grow from the inside out. We can’t know for sure, but maybe there is something about fractals we should be paying more attention to now. Something more divine than any human design. In any case, there are many fractals in nature, and aren’t they beautiful?!

*Excerpt from Acho/Basilion, “Empathy Deficit Disorder: Healing from Our Mix-ups about Work, Home, and Sex.” (2018)