I.
Dismissing other people’s feelings leads to contempt and hatred
When you dismiss someone’s feelings, you might think you’re simply avoiding unnecessary drama or being “rational.” But in practice, you are broadcasting a message: “Your experience doesn’t matter.” That message doesn’t disappear, it festers, and invites hatred.
When someone feels unseen or belittled, they begin to resent the person who dismisses them; that resentment hardens into the single most corrosive emotion in any relationship, whether personal, professional, or political. Contempt is the precursor to disgust and hatred because it combines moral superiority with emotional distance: it’s the feeling that says, “You are beneath me.”
What starts as a minor insensitivity can become a pattern in which you broadcast an unearned and even disprovable level of superiority to others. This leads to a lack of cooperation, and trust breaks down. The “rational” person who refuses to care about emotional states creates the very irrational chaos they claim to despise.
II.
Emotional intelligence improves understanding
The sort of arrogance which asserts that “emotions” cloud being “rational” and who pride themselves on “being rational” are making a deadly mistake. In reality, emotional intelligence is what sharpens judgment, because it helps you predict behavior accurately.
If you want to understand how humans act, vote, buy, cooperate, or rebel or walk away, you must understand their emotional drivers. Pure logic without emotional insight is like a weather model that ignores humidity, technically impressive but fundamentally useless. The person who dismisses feelings is effectively blind to the main variable shaping human behavior.
You should want to know what inspires loyalty, and what provokes retaliation. People with low empathy often walk into social traps because they fail to anticipate how others will feel about their words or actions. In practice, arrogance and cruelty does not accomplish what you wanted; because you’re cutting yourself off from the very signals that make social prediction possible.
III.
You should want to widen Perspective, not just Perception
Cold or highly analytical people often pride themselves on being “objective.” But what they usually have is sharp perception, not broad perspective.
When you ignore other people’s feelings, you narrow your field of view. You perceive the facts of their behavior, tone, words, actions, but you miss the inner logic that makes those behaviors coherent. Emotions are the context layer of human life; they explain why people react as they do. Without emotional awareness, your understanding of others becomes two-dimensional, like reading a financial report without knowing what industry it’s in. The numbers can look bad, until you understand that they are in fishing not minerals.
Caring about feelings doesn’t mean adopting them; it means factoring them into your model of reality. This expands perspective, it lets you see not just the visible motion of people, but the invisible motives shaping those motions. The person who dismisses emotion often perceives more clearly but understands less deeply. The emotionally intelligent person may not always have perfect perception, but they have better perspective.
IV.
Empathy increases stability
When people feel ignored or devalued, tension builds silently, just as heat does in a closed system. Eventually it releases, through rebellion, apathy, passive aggression, or collapse. But when people feel heard or understood pressure dissipates before it becomes destructive.
A leader or partner or lover or friend or institution that detects emotional strain early and responds to it maintains stability. By contrast, one that treats emotion as noise instead of signal blinds itself to warning signs until the crisis arrives.
Even in hard logic terms: stability is preserved by information flow. Emotional awareness keeps that flow open. People continue to communicate, to correct errors, and to align themselves with collective goals. Remove empathy and trust evaporates, and the system enters chaotic oscillation. So caring about feelings isn’t sentimental; it’s realism. The colder you are the more brittle the relationship becomes, until it snaps.
Conclusion
This is ultimately why Ben Shapiro is wrong; it might be a good thing if you are capable of at least understanding and caring about the feelings of the Transexual or the Neo-Nazi. This does not mean agreeing with everyone. This does not mean, not having your own. But it does mean, that you should give a thought to the existence of radically other situations and experiences; because this strengthens your own.