Nice Virus

Maybe I’m thinking about this sympathetic imagination thing too literally, but the way I understand it is that the way in which mankind identify with one another, with other creatures, with inanimate objects is completely selfish in nature because it assumes that that alien “object” is similar to us in more ways than is reasonable to assume. Obviously the practice of “sympathetic identification” works somewhat more successfully between fellow humans than other objects because of fundamental similarities most people share i.e. similarities of the body and mind, similarities of environment, and similarities in basic needs. A deviation from any of these fundamental similarities would not only cause the outlier to experience the world differently, but it would also affect the way he/she/it thinks and reacts to the environment. Any time we try to sympathetically identify with another object, we assume it thinks and reacts to the environment in the same way we would if we were in “the like situation.” As the actual similarities differ more widely, these projections of our own psyche onto other objects become increasingly more inaccurate.
Human can identify with each other with relative accuracy. Although differences in culture, in resources, in climate, even in height or eye color cause every individual person to experience the world differently and therefore think and react differently to their environment, thus making it impossible to completely sympathize with them, certain fundamental similarities cause us to react unavoidably similarly to the world. Nearly every human possesses nearly identical body parts (with respect to gender) and therefore, nearly identical physical limitations with how we are able to interact with our environment. For instance a person with 3 extra limbs would experience the environment completely differently than the rest of us and would thus be much more difficult to identify with, no matter how sophisticated the imagination. We can get a sense of this difference in perception caused by physical dissimilarities by comparing a person who was born without sight and a person who has been blinded at some point in their life because of some unfortunate occurrence. The person who has never experienced sight does not think of the world in terms of images or visions at all, yet a person who was able to see and has since become blind still probably thinks of the world in terms of the images he cannot see. The person who has never experienced vision is much more difficult to sympathetically identify with because, even though it is impossible to grasp the concept of perceiving the world without seeing for most of us, we try to compare that person with ourselves anyway and run a greater risk of being completely off the mark. Obviously, as the differences increase this problem worsens. People try to relate to animals as if they were other people, even though an animal’s perception of the world is far beyond the point of sympathy and is similar only in the most basic ways. The identification between a plant or even a rock or a steel beam and ourselves is at the point of total personification and in no way could we ever hope to experience the feeling of being immobile, thoughtless, and lifeless.
The sympathetic imagination is useful and somewhat accurate in attempting to predict actions or thoughts only between two people, anything beyond that is in the realms of creative abstraction. That is why poetry is so conducive to the idea of personification--it is all about creative abstraction and is ultimately centered around man and they way man perceives things.Naturally, a virus has eyes and a mouth and teeth just like humans. It isn't very nice of this particular virus to want to kill that man. If I were a virus, I wouldn't try to kill people. I would be a nice virus.