this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials:
Did he conclude whether those people started without empathy or just lost it due to the things they did?
I think a good number of them have it educated out of them, by growing up in an environment where empathy is actively discouraged and portrayed as a negative trait.
There's also conditional empathy, where you're taught that there are certain groups to whom empathy doesn't apply (or that empathy only applies to your group), or applies to a lesser extent (e.g., your pet dog deserves empathy — unlike the neighbours' —, but that empathy only extends to taking it behind the shed and shooting it, not to paying for a veterinarian to take care of the minor problem it's suffering from).