I can't empathize much with the people who approve of the executive order barring immigrants from, by sheer coincidence, only those majority-Muslim countries where Trump doesn't happen to have business dealings. (And only those immigrants who happen to be Muslim, allowing a loophole for the persecuted Christians of those regions.)

I know that must make sense to them - that such bans and "extreme vetting" must sound logical and prudent and safe, no more paranoid or irrational than locking the front door. (Nevermind the fact that the vetting we already had was pretty well extreme already.)

But it's ultimately a difference in ideology - in what makes one FEEL safe. And, sure, you can't easily defuse or alter feelings through reason - but don't we often believe we can try? That logic and evidence and reason are the true, meaningful, solid, undeniable things - and feelings and emotions are the ephemeral, malleable ones?

But then you see that some people will completely ignore the evidence of their eyes, if it's socially challenging. Even when it doesn't involve challenging their beliefs about a person they endorse as leader of the free world, people can ignore the evidence of their eyes: Asch conformity experiments - Wikipedia

Or, literally, they'll ignore the threat of fire as a room fills up with smoke: Latane and Darley: Bystander Apathy

It's hard to say what that would be, though. The human mind is so... flexible, to put it kindly. We always think that what we're doing makes sense and is moral. And if we start to doubt that, we just twist and turn things around until we figure out how to justify ourselves again.

I mean, logic and reason don't really work. Faith in a higher power only really works if you're already inclined to not be a shitbag to people in the first place; otherwise you just believe you have a high holy mandate to be a shitbag. Faith in humanity / community? Sure - but then the undesirables end up not being counted as "real people" / "real members."

I have no idea how to even try to instill, or even encourage, empathy in those people who only see it as an absurd and dangerous weakness. Short of just dosing the water supply with raw oxytocin and/or replacing all mass media with reruns of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, anyway.