Importance Of Empathy In Dick Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeps

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Philip’s Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheeps is a science fiction novel that explores the importance of empathy in an advanced technological world where the ability to distinguish humans and androids becomes difficult. Thus, the religion Mercerism becomes invented to separate the empathetic humans from the apathetic androids. Dick focuses on the insincerity of the human’s practice of Mercerism through the characters Rick Dickard and John Isodore, who demonstrate the artificial sense of empathy that separates humans from the androids. The goal of Mercerism is to unite humans through their ability to be empathetic towards one another. This is the separation created to distinguish them from androids. However, Dick shows how hypocritical this notion is when people like Isodore, “the special ones,” are not accepted in society and left in isolation. Isodore explains, “I’m a special; they don’t treat me very well either,like for instance I can’t emigrate” (Dick 78). Ironically, it is Isodore who shows the greatest empathy …show more content…
He encounters Mercer and questions on why he must continue to kill the androids, and Mercer replies, “you will be required to do wrong no matter where you go….it is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity” (Dick 177). Mercer tells Deckard that he must continue to kill the androids even if it violates his own moral principles. Mercer believes that empathy doesn’t always create goodness in the world, which illustrates the hypocrisy of the religion. Even when Mercer is exposed as fake, the people still commemorate him because they would rather experience false emotion than face ‘real’ experiences of empathy. Empathy requires the people to put themselves in the shoes of those suffering; however, Mercerism allows them to feel fake empathy and not have to step down from their high society of artificial
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