"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." Elon Musk, 2020
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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I remember being outraged by that, not only by the evilness, but also about how easy it is to disprove.
As I said back then:
Empathy is one of society's greatest strengths, when people fall down, others will help them up, enabling them to keep contributing to society later, this creates a flexible but strong society.
A society without empathy is a brittle society, it doesn't bend, when someone falls down, they are left behind, and the society loses their their experience and future contributions, creating cracks. Eventually these cracks will break an unempathic society.
You can even claim that empathy is a form of selfishness, by helping other's you make sure that there are other's around that can help you.
TL;DR: Elon lacks basic logic.
Elon lacks empathy. If you don't have empathy it's like some magic fairy miracle stuff, and you don't understand it. So you hate it.
HE does however claim to be logical, he obviously isn't, but he claims to.
ideological is a kind of logic.
So is prejudice.
So are other "religions".
All of them are imprint->reaction programmings.
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I always kind of liked the take that empathy is self serving. You're kind and compassionate to others because it makes you feel good to do so. People without empathy are just less of a person for the lack of it.
I don't understand the perspective you're coming-from.
True empathy is where one totally-understands another's experience/perspective, & one "is one with" their condition/experiencing.
It isn't that it makes you feel good to do that, or even to be able to do that: it's just wired in, an innate-muscle of mind ( the mirror-neuron system, which seems to be broken in psychopaths ).
Why would being pierced by another's grieving make one feel good to be doing?
Honest empathy isn't self-serving.
It is overwhelming.
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Empathy is absolutely not inherent. It is a learned skill and not even most people have it. But either way it should be obvious how being able to better relate to those you socialize with would be beneficial to you.
This is what happens when you build a system that rewards narcissism and psychopathy.
Don't forget machiavellianism: the WHOLE DarkTriad is selected-for, by politics & concentration-of-wealth-archy, both..
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How would he ever have empathy? He has never suffered a day in his life. He probably can't even imagine what it's like
well that's the thing innit. empathy implies the ability to feel and connect to another person regardless of shared experience.
Remember when all the right wing “Christians” were spouting about the “sin of empathy?”
Seriously?
When?
That should be on banners, identifying them as being the enemies of their Christian Holy Spirit.
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God it was 6-8 months ago I think? Some MAGA pastor ass hat wrote a book about it saying empathy was a sin because it led people to not hate gay people basically and all the the fuck nuggets picked it up
I think it is more the other way around. The world is a scary place if you cannot predict other peoples or your own emotional state.
I heard about a fascinating post-Holocaust study that I think is super relevant to what is going on today.
The gist of it is that the perpetrators considered themselves victims of a world conspiring against them, and the awful things they were doing were just defensive. Remind you of anyone?
The heroic helpers, people who risked themselves protecting victims, didn't really want to do it. They just couldn't live with themselves if they ignored the victims in need. The bystanders just wanted to keep their heads down.
The study seems too analogous to what's happening today to ignore.
So, socio/psychopathy. You know, what capitalism extols as a virtue, rewards and what the hellscapes create.
Another saying is something like evil is when you stop seeing other people as people and instead see them as things.
Yes it's a discworld quote
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’ ‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’ ‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
That's exactly what I was thinking of! Of course it's Sir Terry.
Same psychologist talking about Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz:
In all of the discussions, Höss is quite matter-of-fact and apathetic, shows some belated interest in the enormity of his crime, but gives the impression that it never would have occurred to him if somebody hadn't asked him. There is too much apathy to leave any suggestion of remorse and even the prospect of hanging does not unduly stress him. One gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal, but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.
Should have use people, instead of men, but BINGO!
Scary, to ask you all, but how many people do you know apply to that standard, beyond ‘The Crazy Don’, his administration & some the opposite political party? Horror show in Rich-Super Rich Economic Classes/Owners!
Huh I would have expanded it to all sentient animals, but I agree.
THANK YOU, FOR THE CORRECTION, YOU ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! I should have thought of that!
Being low empathy is a cause of problems, and probably often a prerequisite to doing really terrible things, but I don't think everyone like that is evil. You can still decide to do the right thing even if you aren't capable of imagining how others feel.
That is true, but where's the motivation?
IF one's missing empathy, no mirror-neuron-function, so others are just meat-marionettes to one..
why care whether they're butchered or not?
They aren't real if one hasn't got mirror-neuron-function: they aren't SOMEONES, they are meat-marionettes, then.
I think it's the most-fundamental "valid/nonvalid" & "my-kind/others" polarization possible in human-category life..
I've read that there are true-psychopaths who simply abstain from harming those around them, even if they can't understand why anybody would deem these others to be valuable, & I have to admire their character.
That'd take work, for no-reward.
it's like the people who can't experience pain: they usually get dead, early, as a consequence of it.
People without any empathy, whatsoever, how could they avoid massively-butchering others' worth, if it isn't even felt by their sentience, to be real?
Thank you for putting it in this discussion that psychopaths aren't inherently-evil: they're deafblind to empathy, totally, but that character is still significant.
That is what I'd read, & needed reminding of it.
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I recommend the Netflix show "The End of the F...ing World" which is largely about this.
What I think it comes down to is that you can develop an understanding of things that are not intuitive to you, or only intuitive sometimes in narrow circumstances, and the value of human solidarity and cooperation is true on a deep enough level that there are lots of different ways to discover it. As someone who doesn't always have the emotional reactions that people expect or would be reassured by, it bugs me when people push the idea that having the wrong feelings is what makes someone a monster, both because there's way more to it than that and because projected expectations have a powerful influence. People who are angry and numb and looking for a sense of identity shouldn't be villified for the things about themselves they don't get to choose.
from my experience most people's empathy is, at best, selective. what do you call that? selective evil?
you can have low empathy and still decide to not be a horrible person, by using your sympathy instead
inversely, you can be an empathetic person and convince yourself that the people you are oppressing are not human and therefore feel no empathy or sympathy towards them, in fact that’s literally what bigotry is why it exists
Eh, I'm not feeling it.
There should be mandatory psychological testing, and everyone without empathy can be removed from civil society. Let them live together in a faraway land. Antarctica, maybe.
Deport the people you don't like? What's wrong with therapy for damaged people?
It was more a commentary on the use of one idea being used to castigate a huge group of people (those without empathy), which could be applied to ... 'illegal immigrants', and the atrocious things that's led to via ICE (victims being both immigrants, and citizens).
Guess I should've used the /s
That being said, fuck nazis. Ship them all to Mercury.