me_irl

If I had to guess, people like this crave empathy to abuse so no surprise to see them advocate for it.

While I am hesitant to 'diagnose' this from just the comment I replied to alone...

Yes, that's narcissism you're describing.

Narcissists tend to be incapable of validating themselves, so they do things to garner attention and validation from others, which can lead to many other chains of behaviors, mechanisms, feedback loops.

This would also explain the ... entirely abstract explanation of empathy, while simultaneously totally failing to excercise any actual empathy:

Its a theoretical concept to a narcissist.

Also, its just immensely ironic to give a lecture about empathy, while failing to exercise any.

Low self-awareness.

... and that's coming from me, an Autist, a kind of person who is generally maligned and stereotyped as having "low eq" and not understanding interpersonal social dynamics.

No, no, I understand them better than most, its just that normies (neurotypicals) have a much higher default threshold for tolerating narcissistic behavior, and are also much more blind to it, so then the normies will think that calling out narcissistic behavior is 'overreacting', unless the narcissistic behavior is comically extreme, megalomaniacal.

On a larger scale, that's how you end up with the overconfident leading the blind.