Wearing Empathy On One's Sleeve

Analyzing Charlie Kirk's critique of empathy in a culture that champions victimhood and phony virtue signaling.

Iago, in Shakespeare’s Othello, is one of the most fascinating and peculiar villains in all of literature. Though he is constantly deceiving and manipulating Othello and everyone else, in asides he lets the audience know his true, malevolent intentions. One of his most complex verbal formulations is the following:

Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so for my peculiar end.
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, ’tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.

Kenneth Branaugh as Iago in 1995 film adaptation of “Othello”

In other words, the feelings of love and duty he expresses are not true, but a false appearance of these for his “peculiar end.” His “peculiar end” is the destruction of Othello and Desdemona.

And then comes the disturbing image that only an imagination as fertile as Shakespeare’s could imagine.

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.

By this he means he will outwardly show his (false) feelings (“wear my heart upon my sleeve”) while at the same time representing his heart as a rotten thing to be eaten by carrion birds (jackdaws, a species of crow).

In recent days, Charlie Kirk’s critics have cited some of his controversial statements in a grotesque gambit to explain and even justify the coldblooded murder of the young man. One of Kirk’s (purported) statements that has been singled out for special derision is the following.

I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage.

I suspect that this statement has been taken out of context, but even if if it hasn’t, I believe it’s clear what he meant by it, and that he had a valid point.

In our current culture that champions victimhood, expressions of empathy for favored victims have become a variation of virtue signaling—that is, a means for phony people to promote and morally aggrandize themselves.

Those who offer such expressions of empathy for favored “victims” confer a perverse form of praise and success on the “victims,” thereby encouraging them to remain victims instead of doing the hard work necessary to forge a path forward to well-being and success. In this false and corrupt game, the “empath” gets to feel morally superior and the “victim” gets attention and status for being a victim.

Iago had the self-awareness to know and confess that he was a treacherous “knave” who faked love and loyalty for his “peculiar end.” He doesn’t explicate his motive, but hints that it’s a combination of sexual jealousy, envy, and resentment.