Why Is It So Hard to Believe In Other People’s Pain?

People—and groups—who are suffering are often dismissed. Scarry’s axiom might help us understand why.
Illustration with side side profiles of characters crying and squiggly lines
Illustrations by Santos Shelton

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Hostile suspicion of others, encompassing everything from the position of their mask to their stance on mandates, has marked this wretched pandemic from the start. Now, in perhaps the unkindest cut, suspicion is aimed at people with long Covid—the symptoms that may afflict as many as a third of those who survive a first hit of the virus. One theory is that Covid infection riles up the body's defenses and can leave the immune system in a frenzy, causing shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, and brain fog. In The Invisible Kingdom, her forthcoming book about chronic illness, Meghan O'Rourke reports that doctors often reject these symptoms as meaningless. When medical tests for these patients come up negative, “Western medicine wants to say, ‘You're fine,’” says Dayna McCarthy, a physician focused on long Covid.

This is not surprising. Skepticism about chronic conditions, including post-polio syndrome and fibromyalgia, is exceedingly common—and it nearly always alienates patients, deepens their suffering, and impedes treatment. Until researchers can find the biomarkers that might certify long Covid as a “real” disease, the best clinicians can do is listen to testimony and treat symptoms. But the project of addressing long Covid might also be served by a more rigorous epistemology of pain—that is, a theory of how we come to believe or doubt the suffering of other people.

In her 1985 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry makes a profound assertion: “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.” Because the claim illuminates both pain and knowledge, and because women rarely attach their names to philosophical assertions, I'd like, belatedly, to dub this elegant proposition “Scarry's axiom.”

The axiom came to mind this fall for two reasons: I was trying to support a friend with long Covid, and I participated in a forum about how the media contends with racism. It was the second experience that illuminated the first and suggested Scarry's axiom as a way to understand the acute distrust that now pervades our pluralistic country.

At the forum, a socialist and a libertarian each lodged complaints. The socialist charged that the media's focus on racism leaves out a more significant battle—the never-ending class struggle. The libertarian argued that the media's focus on race fails to understand the individual, with his or her pressing fear of death and aspirations to art, money, and transcendence. The libertarian then took shots at easily offended undergraduates who put emotion before reason and are forever getting “offended” and needing “safety,” which he said were postures incompatible with education.

This familiar debate ground on. As far as I can tell, no one on any side—and I disagreed with both the socialist and the libertarian—ever budged. But perhaps that's because we kept missing a truth in front of our faces: that we were all dismissing as somehow less than real the pain of others while elevating our own, and that of our confreres, as hard fact.

As Scarry's book makes clear, this dynamic of doubt holds for both emotional anguish and physical pain. Microaggressions toward another tribe? Those can't be so bad. But setbacks to a meritorious individual's fortune-building efforts and attacks by sniveling critics and cancelers? To a libertarian, those represent authentic agony. Rich tech bros who complain of loneliness and despair? These strike socialists as entitled elites, weeping over their dented Teslas while the working class are trapped in debt.

But Scarry's axiom does more than conjure what some call the oppression olympics, the demoralizing squabbles about which demographic deserves a gold medal for the greatest suffering. By the axiom, it's not that some forms of pain are more acute than others; it's that some pain seems undeniable while other suffering appears fraudulent.

You can see why this renders futile the well-intentioned empathy-building exercise in which students listen while classmates share trying personal experiences. Before we even think of empathizing with others—an advanced psychological operation—we have to confront a deeper problem: We don't even believe them. Paradoxically, the more insistent or dramatic an account of suffering is, the more likely listeners are to fear that they're being manipulated. If that anxiety about coercion is then conveyed as doubt (“I'm not buying it”), the original sufferer may perceive their listener's irritability as nothing but a cover for cruelty or gaslighting. And on it goes. This belief-doubt spiral is especially common in America, or on the internet, where no single idiom exists for the credible expression of pain.

Scarry argues that any response that meets the statement “I am in pain” cannot reflect the same degree of pain (since it's not in the respondent's body), and thus may strike the pained person as insufficiently understanding. The pained person might then decide that the best way to call attention to their affliction (the better to get relief from it) is by inflicting a little pain on the other party: snapping, shouting, crying, or turning away. Two people end up in pain—one with aches, the second with aggravation. Each is suspicious of the other. And each experiences the other as a source of pain instead of a salve for it.

This is on display in American medicine and politics, but it's cartoonishly clear in sports, especially pro soccer, which includes hammy performances of pain that fall outside the usual idiom of American athletics. While Americans love to exaggerate aggression, and consider flexing (trash-talking, posing, menacing an opponent) mostly wholesome, they famously disdain the common European move of exaggerating injury, or flopping. As Eric Levenson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014, American athletes fail at “selling their falls” with arias of agony, and try to pass off their refusal to flop as a “moral victory to cling to when they inevitably lose.”

Why is this?

The refusal to cry out in pain seems grounded in an entrenched anxiety related to Scarry's axiom: What if all pain is an act, even our own? Seen this way, preserving skepticism about other people's groans and wails may be a shield against guilt. If we believe in another's pain, after all, we may feel obliged to fix it, or take on the blame. Here's where the debate about representations of racism comes in. A case study is the far-right complaint (in dubious faith) that white kids who are taught critical race theory are being guilt-tripped about the suffering of races to which they don't belong. In the unusual quest of Americans to feel no guilt, many of us are quick to forcefully repel claims of pain. We don't only have doubt, as Scarry's axiom has it; we cultivate that doubt and extend it to the suffering of others.

The answer, obviously, is not to stop expressing or acknowledging pain. The speech act known as complaint is not an accusation or a demand for remedy. Rather, it's a plea for witness, a request to be paid the simple courtesy of belief. O'Rourke, who herself suffers from chronic illness, describes the intense loneliness of being doubted. That loneliness is deepened when listeners panic about being manipulated and can't even accept a description of pain as plausible or interesting, lest they spiral into helplessness and self-recrimination.

People who high-handedly dismiss long Covid patients using words like “you're fine” must dial down their anxiety about being tricked or trapped. This pandemic-ridden country has not been fine for a long time, and to recognize that is not to be a fool, but to be sane.

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This article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

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