Gamers are pretty definitive proof that you can’t just megadose empathy like this. All that happens is they breed greater resentment.

Liberals love to boil war down to its abstracts.

War is, to them, inherently bad because of the destruction and death it causes.

They think that all you need is empathy to end conflicts, that all political issues in the world can be solved by love and understanding.

They don’t care what the justifications for a conflict are, nor do they care what the goals of the conflict are. All wars are evil, all fighting is evil. The liberal is good, those who wage war are evil.

They don’t care about genocide, they don’t care about aggression, and they especially don’t care about international treaties. They only care about empathy.

If you put a VR headset on someone who’s waging a war to defeat Nazism and prevent genocide they’re not going to walk away with something new. They already have empathy, they already feel for the civilians who’ve been caught in the crossfire. Their goals are more important than the suffering the war will cause, and as someone who makes hard choices, they’ve already come to terms with that.

Defeating Nazis is far more important than the rough time the war will cause for a young woman in Kyiv. And if that young woman is herself a Nazi, then her rough time doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Maybe liberals should put on the headset and see what Russians living in Eastern Ukraine & Crimea have been going through under the Ukrainian government, show them what the Nazis have been doing in the Donbas. Maybe then they’d understand that empathy for Ukraine equates to sympathy for Fascism, if that empathy pushes them to oppose Russia’s war.

This isn’t even science fiction. This is Warhammer 40k levels of “current tech is magic, and if we just appease the machine spirit, he will shower blessings on us.”