@fierceawakening, empathy debate stuff below. (And everyone else if you want to avoid that.)
I saw you posted recently (http://fierceawakening.tumblr.com/post/182796258715/fwiw-i-didnt-really-have-elitism-in-mind-when-i) asking for clarification about the idea of empathy leading to bullying, noting that it seems like sharing in other people’s emotions would make someone reluctant to hurt them. I’ve agreed with you on a lot of the empathy stuff, but this really threw me off; the idea that empathy could be a motive and tool for bullying is incredibly intuitive to me. (I know you followed up with the post about empathy provoking cognitive dissonance and that provoking anger, but I don’t think it’s just that.) I started to draft a long reply expressing confusion about some of your post. I’ll still try to put it up later.
But I just found out that Peter Welch has been writing a series of comics about life as a ‘fake extrovert’, which is basically a first-hand answer to your question. The very short precis is that he was shy but extremely high empathy, decided to get good at socializing, succeeded largely thanks to that empathy, and then used his empathy to treat people around him like shit for fun and profit. That’s all by his own description.
As he puts it:
I had weaponized my empathy. I was an asshole. Using the very thing that’s supposed to keep people from being assholes, to be an asshole to people.
His conclusion is that he realized what he was doing, realized that it wasn’t okay, and worked to be a better person. He credits a good upbringing and a desire to be a decent human; I think there are pretty obvious signs of empathy mattering in his redemption arc, too. It doesn’t seem like an accident that he relied on alcohol, avoidance, and over-stimulation to ignore the harm he was doing to people.
It really seems like he gets where you’re coming from - he struggled for a long time before going down that road, and he specifically writes about why his behavior was bad from the perspective of the people he hurt. He even calls empathy the thing that’s supposed to keep people from being assholes!
But... fundamentally, it’s a story of how he went from being shy and overwhelmed by people’s emotions to hurting people for fun, in ways that he wouldn’t and couldn’t have without being high empathy.
I don’t think that’s inevitable or the only thing empathy does, and I certainly don’t have handy stats on average empathy levels among bullies. But I will say that I read it and went “woah, it’s a first hand account from one of those people!” I hope it might help you form a reference image of a bully who’s excellent at perspective-taking and uses that to mistreat people.