Empathy is usually defined as the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another, and in recent decades it has become a supreme, universal value that serves to measure the moral quality of people. In The Brand (Random House Literature), the Icelandic Frída Ísberg (1992) maps a not-too-distant future in which her country considers establishing mandatory empathy tests to distinguish antisocial individuals from those who could be integrated, and in which There are marked neighborhoods in which all the inhabitants are proven to be empathetic. In the days before Parliament votes on whether or not the test becomes mandatory for all Icelanders, several characters (among them, an upstart psychologist and a young man disengaged from the system) see their lives shaken by this eventuality.
With this spring, it is not strange that different groups, from the libertarian right to the skeptical left, have wanted to see a manifesto in this intelligent speculative political fiction text. The author contemplates the controversies that her own novel is raising in each country with literary distance and a certain Nordic calm. Stating one thing and, in the following sentence, qualifying it so that it almost seems the opposite.
His book is a veritable mine of controversial topics. Does it generate different conversations in each country, in each language into which it is translated?
In some ways yes. The polarizing topics change each semester and vary depending on the country. That’s fine for me, because it allows me not to repeat myself too much. They still ask me things they haven’t asked me before. In Norway, for example, they were very obsessed with the future of boys, of men, how they are slipping through the cracks of the system. Or when the book comes out in a country where abortion is not legal, they ask me a lot about those decisions of bodily autonomy, the lack of freedom of the individual. And, of course, when it was published as a book in Iceland, it was completely hijacked by the debate over Covid vaccination, whether it should be mandatory. They also ask me a lot about Artificial Intelligence and surveillance…
It mentioned vaccination. Was the book written during the pandemic?
I had the idea for the book in 2018 and I wrote it until early 2021, just when the first vaccines were beginning, and by then I had already finished the second draft of the book. So it didn’t influence my writing, but when the book was published in Iceland in October 2021, it got hijacked by that public debate.
I understand that Iceland’s justice minister at the time, a far-right woman, declared herself a fan of the book. She has made that libertarian, anti-state reading.
If you want to read the book as a satire of the left, you can, but that wasn’t my intention at all. That’s what happens when you let the reader decide, that everyone interprets it how they want.
Didn’t she see that reaction coming, that they would try to turn her into some kind of anti-woke spokesperson?
No, and my policy is not to comment and not to deny. When they tag me in a thread on social media, I ignore it. And that has not been the general reading of the book either. Most people have understood it for what it is, a book about polarization and misinformation. And maybe a warning not to follow the herd mentality, but I wasn’t even speaking out against that. Herd mentality is extremely valuable to our survival. I just wanted to explore how those who don’t participate in the shared values ??of the flock are marginalized and discriminated against. In this case, the shared value is empathy. What happens is that empathetic people deactivate their empathy with non-empathetic people. It’s like a kind of experiment.
The idea of ??empathy has enormous weight in current thinking and permeates various ideologies. What are the limits of empathy? The thinker Paul Bloom wrote a book against empathy, proposing instead a “rational compassion,” which he considers more useful. I don’t know if he considers that difference.
Of course. I like that term. Empathy can reach a ceiling. It is proven that we empathize less with people who do not look the same as us, for example. With people of another gender, of another age, of another origin. But again, empathy is what connects us and what makes us save each other. After the Second World War, empathy was imposed as a magical solution. We believed that if we taught our children empathy, nothing bad would happen to us, that we would not fall into this cold-blooded war again. But that’s not the case, you just have to look at the news.
I’m afraid I’m going to ask you the Norwegian question too. One of his protagonists is a young man unconnected with the system, and he gives some figures in the book. In this near future, 25% of men do not work or study. Men’s rights advocates, masculinists, use this type of data to warn that men are being left behind. They believe that feminism has gone too far and pushes away the masculine.
This is a mostly positive problem. And with many roots. I should start by saying that I have a brother 13 years younger than him who is dyslexic. And this book is largely dedicated to him. It contains my concern for my brother, who was also about 13 years old when I started writing it. Watching these teenagers like him, I saw that if they don’t find their place within the school system, or in football, or in video games, there is nothing for them. Especially if they grow up in a small community, as is the case with my brother. Just like everywhere else, in Iceland the number of children who do not go to school is greater, they are not completing their elementary level. And there is this great concern about what is wrong with us, why there are more men in prisons.
Iceland is a very feminist country. There are many institutions dedicated to empowering girls to lead. My friends are scared when they get pregnant and discover that they are going to have a boy, that they are going to bring a man into the world, because the idea now is that having a girl is much easier. There is fear of raising a child and having it go wrong. It is not that there is discrimination, but there are preconceived ideas about the problem that boys pose. I don’t have many answers for that.
Another fundamental issue in the book is the obsession with therapy. He would say that the word “psychologist” is the most repeated in the book. At all times people are sent to a psychologist or they feel sorry for having stopped going, which in this scenario is almost worse than not showering. There are, of course, several characters in the novel who are psychologists as well. Do you think that psychotherapy has taken the role of the Church? Are we trusting it too much?
In some ways, yes. But also, in some ways, not. I think we have institutionalized our mental health too much. It’s almost like going to wash your car. Do you feel bad? Have you lost someone? Have you had your heart broken? Are you depressed? The only thing offered to you is therapy. People always ask you: “Have you talked to anyone?” And it makes you want to respond: “yes, I’m talking to you.” I imagined that in the future we would have gone a step further, and people would be shamed for not trying to be as good individuals in society as they could be. Just like if you don’t check the car they won’t let you drive. If you don’t go to therapy, you could be doing toxic harm to other people. Still, I’m not saying that therapy is bad, just that that’s the direction we’re going.
In the novel, advocates of empathy always invoke security, which is often a key word for right-wing politicians. Here, however, it is people who come from the left who assume it. Is security the gateway to racist ideas, for example?
Yes absolutely. As soon as you lock yourself in a safe place, you are leaving someone out. You are creating a society within a society. An idea that obsessed me in this book is that of public and private space. Just because your apartment is yours, it is your safe place. And the moment you venture outside, you are in society, you live with other people. Public space is becoming the private sector of your mind. I liked to play with that idea, to see where the limits are between the private and the public, where the individual ends and where society begins. If we want to participate in society, do we have to follow the rules? There are so many rules! There are rules for everything. Every inch of this planet is on the map and owned by someone, and you have to follow the rules wherever you go. Sorry, have I answered your question?
I think so. This is a very choral book. Which of the characters would you like to spend more time with, even if they don’t represent your position?
I understand you all and I understand what moves you. I myself was experimenting with my own empathy, with how much backstory I wanted to give to each one. If you don’t know the past and where a character comes from, can you empathize with them? Even with language. The character of Tristan, for example [one of those young people disengaged from the system, who has failed the empathy test], the first time he appears he says the word “rape” in a very careless manner. He says something is violating his ears. My editor told me: do we have to have this word that can trigger trauma for some readers? I said yes, because no word was going to deny the character empathy as quickly as that one. And then knowing his story would make the reader grant it to him. About halfway through the writing process, I realized that the book was about whether Tristan would survive in this society or not. He became the main character for me. That being said, I don’t know if I would want it in my house.