politics

They've been on this shit for decades, they're only finally calling it what it is. 20 years ago they called everyone they didn't like, a Bleeding Heart. They've always been against basic human emotions like empathy. CAPITALISM CONDITIONS SOCIOPATHS. You can't have a ruthlessly competitive and individualistic system AND be a social being. Pick a lane.

I've also noticed the crusade against empathy

In fact, I would say there has been a crusade against a lot of the things that make us human. All personality outside "mindless capitalist cog" seems to be pathologised.

The term “toxic empathy” was coined largely by Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative evangelical podcaster. Like so many things with evangelical Christianity, when you have the light of materialism you actually need to dumb yourself down a bit to try and understand it. But here’s my attempt to explain it (cw: I will be talking about how evangelicals justify their transphobia)

Evangelicals despise trans people, gays, brown immigrants, poor people (with poor people being a reasonable proxy for them for “black folks”), womens rights, etc. They want to strip away the rights and protections from these groups and establish some form of Christian nationalism and white supremacy. But the problem is they can’t just come out and say it because their views are already fairly unpopular. So they are trying out this idea that being empathetic to others is usually harmful to the person you are expressing empathy for (btw, Stuckey can’t even get her words right. She’s talking about sympathy, not empathy. But I will stick with calling it “empathy” even though Stuckey is a dumbass who can’t even get this right).

For example, according to evangelicals, being gay or trans is a sin. God designed us to be cis and het. And since God’s designs for his creation are perfect, if you decide to transition and identify as something other than the gender you were assigned to at birth, you are harming yourself. Thus, if you try and empathize with someone who is trans and naturally support their rights to like, exist, your empathy is toxic because you are harming the subject of your empathy and society at large. If you really cared about them, you would explain that their choices are sinful but God offers hope for their souls - not only for their eternal destination, but for the ability to make them cis, the later they usually think is possible through prayer and accepting Jesus as savior, I shit you not. Everything I said above would apply to gay, lesbian, and bi folks as well.

Empathizing with women who want to right to have an abortion is toxic because motherhood is God’s greatest gift to women and what they were designed for. Empathizing with poor people is bad because of the tired old trope that helping poor people only increases their dependence on others. I actually can’t figure out how they think being empathic to immigrants is “toxic”. That’s a tough one because they want to say having more brown people just dilutes the nation’s pure white genes, but can’t. But I didn’t bother to look it up yet.

So all this is your typical evangelical pablum. The only thing about it I find interesting is that it’s not directed towards people outside of evangelicalism. Back in the 90s and 00s, evangelicals would talk a lot about “Judeo-Christian values” as a way to get conservative non-evangelicals and independents to align with their political program. But in recent years, with the rise of Christian nationalism, they seem to be giving up on convincing anyone outside of their own to go along with them. Evangelicals think they have sufficient numbers to enact their political program if they can just get their own people in line and show up to vote. And so long as they maintain their undying allegiance to capital, they may have a point. The capital-evangelical “alliance” means evangelicals get political influence well beyond their numbers. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

Simple answer. Apply the answer to the paradox of tolerance to "toxic empathy".

Pay kindness back tenfold. Pay cruelty back tenthousandfold

Bunch of youth pastors around here are "writing" books about the "err of charity and the limits of empathy". I should've punched one in particular when I had the chance back in the day...

Being against empathy is a prerequisite for "the right".

One of the authors Robinson critiques, Allie Beth Stuckey, had a batshit interview with Ross Douthat in the New York Times, because we're back to 2016's fad of trying to understand the conservative mindset? Because the New York Times has always been engaged in the project of giving liberals permission to embrace conservative thinking? Because America has eroded the concept of literacy to the point where words are meaningless and now even the consumption of printed matter is now a performative method of reinforcing group identity?

Anywho these people are creeps and monsters and a right thinking society would've treated their naked misanthropy like nuclear waste and exiled them to the desert with a warning plaque.

Anybody who treats the Heart as the enemy cannot be suffered. Without it the mind is a shitty calculator that's incapable of actually understanding life or reality except through intellectual process that misses the mark way more than it ever hits.

If those ghouls want to wage war on empathy, that's dangerous in a way that requires response.

They really think ‘All of our kind will get slaves!’.

They all seem to be under the impression they have the cold blooded mettle to become crouchwalking, super soldier operatives like Venom Snake or some shit

Empathy is required to be a good person. Those without empathy are evil and need to be treated as such.

I was thinking a few months ago that empathy might be the core of the entire revolution, since overcoming the alienation of our neoliberal capitalist shit hole society is kind of the entire point. I'm still not sure if I was libbing out. But the negation of the negation is the negation of alienation, is it not?