"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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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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For 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.
No. That is a way of making it seem like a distant thing that has no relation to you. That is a lie you tell yourself for your own comfort.
Everyone suspends their empathy when it is convenient. I guarantee you have already done it today. You have decades of practice doing it to animals, and when the time comes that you need to do it to a human, you will know exactly how its done. No sociopathy required.
While it is true that the cultures we are born into usually are selectively-sociopathic, not all remain with that process/engineered-evolution.
& I've experienced bodhichitta, itself: so any claim that "everyone suspends their empathy" cannot apply to anyone who is permanently in bodhichitta: it's mutually-exclusive with suspending-empathy.
More-objective empathy makes one more & more incompatible with the cultures of this world, though: that is absolutely true.
One is "insane" according to the comparatively-sociopathic cultures that rule.
Exactly as Confucian Marxist Leninist culture in China deems spirituality insanity, & holds that it ought be subjected to psychiatric-treatment.
& .. to me, sociopathy is a spectrum, not a binary off/on toggle: most of the cultures of this world are somewhat sociopathic.
( I'm using "sociopathic" for induced-non-empathy, vs psychopathic for intrinsically-incapable-of-empathy )
Moneyarchy & concentration-of-wealth-archy absolutely do value DarkTriad-nature for dominance & supremacism.
The reason they're successful is because narcissism is normal in humankind, & therefore the "soil is rich" for that development, among our species..
which was actually my reason for opening this discussion to add:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/people-of-the-lie-m-scott-peck/1100181526?ean=9780684848594
identifies that the root of evil seems to be narcissism.
This guy, above, identifies it as non-empathy.
They seem to be 2 sides of the same coin, though:
if one has honest empathy for others, then that undermines narcissism.
If one hasn't empathy, then narcissism hasn't got anything competing against it, in one's sentience.
& that, itself, seems to be a bad problem.
I believe that the whole "it's narcissism 1st" vs "it's non-empathy 1st" is idiotic: chicken vs chicken-egg, argument..
They're co-evolving, aren't they?
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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.
Individuals must always be treated as ends, never as means. Animals are individuals, too.
Please note that it is not only humans that person must exercise empathy for to avoid being evil. Most people suspend their empathy several times a day and don't even notice. And that is a fucking evil thing to do. Any time you have to turn off your empathy to do something, you're being a fucking monster.
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!
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
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.
from my experience most people's empathy is, at best, selective. what do you call that? selective evil?
You call it evil. Most people do evil.
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.
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.