People will use you for what they want. I'm sure you're no different really. It's just a human thing but there's always going to be at least one party that gets hurt.
This is oversimplifying and a black & white view on the world. If you make some more effort, I'm sure you can contribute better to the discussion.
There are many relations where both parties give and take, so that both parties are mostly happy with the relation in question.
Some people are mature responsible adults that are able to put themselves in others' shoes and see a situation from several angles.
The problem is that there isnt enough empathy around
Good point. A very simple exercise would be to imagine what it would be like or how it would feel like if what happens to some other people happened to you. If a person is unable to do this, perhaps he's a psychopath? But very many people lack compassion because the affected issues don't affect themselves.
Let us take a very easy example. The war on terror with the drone attacks done by the USG. If everyone involved here realized that the kid losing its parents, or a kid getting hurt for life, they could turn it around and picture this affected child to be their own child, their sister or their brother. And then the very simple and rhetorical question would be: Would you wish this to happen for your own child, or your brother or sister? If not, why are you doing it?
Instead innocent deaths caused by drones are called '
bugsplatter'. So instead of realizing that real innocent people with families, lives and hope and dreams for the future is demolished and killed, it's just called a 'bugsplat'. And on the operator's screen it's not too much detail, so the horror unfolding, a child lying on the ground screaming it's lungs out bleeding out of bodyparts that's blasted of and surrounded with dead relatives, it's not something the operator sees.
The operator might as well be deliberately brainwashed, told he's doing a great service for his country, and that he's conducting surgical drone warfare and that everything is precise and well done. So the brainwashed operator might 'squash a few bugs', then go out with his buddies and have some beers and then watch a soccer game, all the time without thinking about what he really does and realizing the real impact of it.
Any would-ber operator should be put on the ground to see the horrors first hand, and they should be presented for molested childs before they sign up for the job, then they could chose whether they wanted to live off a small wage killing other innocent people in distant countries.
But over to the give-take thing in relations. I think those who are compassionate and considerate will care about other people and also contact them without having selfish motivation for doing so. Those who are cold and just exploit other people will eventually end up lonesome and unhappy. Nobody wants to be around those who only exploit others.
I think what is needed for certain people is to see the other side of the coin to wake up. Some people can on an intellectual level imagine and understand the viewpoint and situation of others, while others needs to be put in their shoes and experience what they experience to try to put themselves in their position and to develop some empathy.
Here's more from the bugsplat article above:
Bugsplat is the official term used by US authorities when humans are killed by drone missiles. The existence of children's computer games of the same name may lead one to think that the PlayStation analogy with drone warfare is taken too far. But it is deliberately employed as a psychological tactic to dehumanise targets so operatives overcome their inhibition to kill; and so the public remains apathetic and unmoved to act. Indeed, the phrase has far more sinister origins and historical use: In dehumanising their Pakistani targets, the US resorts to Nazi semantics. Their targets are not just computer game-like targets, but pesky or harmful bugs that must be killed.
