Hysterical empathy

On the rhetoric of civilizational saviorhood. In this compelling self-searching essay, Shaan Sachdev, a news editor who worked on an international desk during the Rohingya crisis, provides a compelling reflection on interventionism and empathy. ‘When we gratuitously import the suffering of others into our own self-conceptions, when we resist calculating a hierarchy of wrongs, when we catastrophize an issue rather than deliberate its solutions, when we allow a surfeit of zeal to scuttle pragmatic action, or when we lose sight of individuality — our own or that of the sufferers — in our rush to administer blanket sympathy, then our empathy may be said to have become 'hysterical.'"