Something is killing Republicans all over America.

You must have heard that Republicans are searching for a way to remake their party’s image. But they need to find out what is killing them first.

Those who have been scratching their heads, visiting the rural parts of West Virginia in search of the magic wand can now relax. It turned out that it is the lack of empathy that is killing Republicans.

The Republicans are suffering from Empathy Deficiency Syndrome, EDS. They should now thank President Obama for giving them the tool with which they revealed the mystery.

Despite the trouble their party is in, they came out swinging last week because President Obama suggested that the judge he would nominate to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, would be a man or woman with empathy.

On Sunday morning talk shows, they jumped the shark as they called empathy a code word for activist judge. Some called it a code word for a judge who supports abortion. Others call it a word for a judge who supports gay rights.

The panic they showed over the use of the word, empathy, was preposterous. But in it lies the answer to the Republican troubles. It’s empathy, stupid.

Incidentally, last Sunday, Rahman, a friend of mine who is studying neurophysiology at Harvard University sent me a paper of his to proof read. The title of the paper was “On The Nature of Empathy.” It was for the class, An Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

For me, it was a quick reintroduction to psychology. I re-acquainted myself with the id, the ego and the superego. Reading it was like going on a journey during which I visited Socrates, Plato, Freud, Lipps, Einstein, Bowlby, Kohlberg and others.

I was fascinated by a study done by psychiatrist Jules Masserman at Northwestern University. In the study, Masserman’s team found out that majority of rhesus monkeys will rather be hungry than to get their food at the cost of electrocuting one of their own specie.

In subtitles like Evolution and the Function of Empathy, the paper argued that there are higher level empathy and lower level empathy.

The men and women in the Republican Party seem to have a lower level of empathy.

In the paper, I learnt about butterfly effect. It is a phrase used by psychoanalysts to describe a condition in chaos theory where the subject is unable to escape their initial conditioning.

Poor Republicans! I hope they escape from their chaotic world. Even monkeys will not go as low as they have gone. And I have not added Dick Cheney to their number.