Contagion through empathy

Can you be happy if everybody's miserable?  

Is this a contagion or an influence?

Recent comments revealed that the Nazi state ruled compassion to be a weakness. There are many modern day equivalents. We've been watching a 3-parter called Putin a Russian Spy Story, and there appeared to be very little compassion in their takeover of Chechnya. Similarly newsreel films from Africa displayed scenes of unnecessary harshness, beatings being inflicted on people who disobeyed the stay at home measures.

When the sun shines after several bleak days, everybody seems to smile.

How does it affect us? Is it possible to feel somebody's happiness or unhappiness?

People may cringe on seeing other people's sicknesses, or avert their gaze when watching bloody television scenes.

In order not to feel it, you have to shield yourself against it. Egotism is this attempt to shield ourself from sympathy, from empathy. The ego is a very useful device for providing protection. Built up through childhood and beyond, it provides a dynamic reference point to turn to, away from the presented stimuli hitting the senses.  

Compassion is feeling with someone, suffering with them. And if you're not egotistically guarded with the buffers up as Gurdjieff would say, you will have compassion, you will spontaneously suffer with them and join them. Their joy is yours:  not metaphorically ... actually. And their misery is your misery. And to the perceiver this is very real, it isn't metaphorical.

Not so easy to appreciate for a person steeped in materialism, but for anyone who appreciates that we have our being in a universal energy field, it becomes relatively easy to accept. In the same manner, the placebo effect is more easily accepted by such a person.

So how much of this coronavirus proliferation is due to media reporting? How empathic are you? Do the newsreels of suffering instil fear in you? Is your ego structure, and what you believe, strong enough to protect you?