Empathy for the Devil

Understanding despicable people

Today I am speaking to the Drucker School of Management at 1 pm Eastern. By itself, this is a hilarious idea. I would be hard pressed to come up with a character as lacking in business acumen as myself. As an undergraduate I studied first philosophy (always good for a chuckle from audiences at book festivals), and next art history (the laughs get bigger). Then, in my career since college I have worked at I think exactly one for-profit corporation. That corporation was Tiffany and Co., where I was briefly employed as an intern in the corporate archives. The job itself was fascinating - authentication of designs, helping to curate in-store exhibitions, researching pieces coming to auction that might be worth acquiring. The archives were technically under the umbrella of the publicity department. At the time my supervisor drily remarked that we were literally the only division at TCo that was not focused on profit.

(Working in the archives also wrecked me for any jewelry made in the second half of the twentieth century. Really, why bother?)

“I was especially struck by how sensitively you portrayed them,” my interviewer said during our prep call for the talk today. He was referring to the Astor book. “Most people find it hard to have empathy for really wealthy people.”

“Oh?” I said. I saw no reason to tell him that I am one of most people.

“Yes,” he said. “But really, I have tremendous empathy for them. It can be so isolating. And hard to find purpose.”

“Well,” I said. “Yes. But there’s a solution for that.”

He looked momentarily confused. “Brooke Astor’s grandsons were disinherited,” I said. They seem, near as I can tell from available reports, to be perfectly nice regular people. A solution elegant in its simplicity, and perhaps impossible to conceive.

(Best. Talk advert. Ever.)

So what’s next?

In fifteen minutes I’m giving this talk. Then, on February 28, I’m speaking virtually for the Ashland Public Library at 7 pm. And the first weekend of March I’m in Florida for the Southwest Florida Reading Festival. I will be talking about the necessity of radical empathy in the writing of fiction. And, maybe, in the living of life.