I have previously characterised conservatism as primarily a lack of empathy. This quote does not bode well for America.
As a corollary:
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
- Edmund Burke
This seems to have been bastardized by history into the following much more well known, but never actually directly stated:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
What were the words of Elmo musk again? That there is too much empathy in the world? Fo figure
The definition of empathy: “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation”
Yes. By definition, if you are able to feel empathy - I.e., if you can put yourself in another person’s shoes - you wouldn’t behave like any sycophant in the world, from Trump and his hateful MAGA’s, to Putin, to Netanyahu, to Musk, and each and every single agent of chaos and unchecked greed attempting to mess around with mankind as if they were self-proclaimed messiahs and not the representation of humanity’s own cancer cells.
His observations were correct and can be applied to many situations and places worldwide. We are held back by hate and lack of empathy. We are unable to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors.
Empathy is a verb like “gardening” is though, we don’t make a rational abrupt decision to empathize with a group one day because our empathy rings a bell and we bark in response obediently.
No, we nurture empathy the same way one nurtures a garden and hopefully if we do it right empathy erupts from the soil and fills our vision with new colors we could never have imagined before. Empathy dawns on us like consciousness does to a sleeping mind waking up peacefully.
Empathy is a practice in the same way genuinely religious people may describe their spirituality as a “practice” not a possession.
Psychopaths are physically incapable of it since birth though, not through any fault of their own, yet most are completely normal everyday people that don’t commit atrocities 🤷♂️
You see this with zionists and in Israel
But if I’m right and they’re wrong then it’s ok.
/S
There’s a whole camp of folks on Lemmy that appear to disagree with the verdicts of Nuremburg, which is something I never expected. When it comes to Julius Striecher, a couple people feel injustice.
Like I get strict death penalty abolitionism, but damn if that’s the example to hold onto. A hell of a test case.
They should have hung half of the fuckers they saved with Operation Paperclip too.
At least the Saturn 5 wasn’t built with slave labor. Can’t say that about the prototypes.
Wow, this is so true. Keep in mind there’s technically no such thing as cold. Or dark. What we call that is simply the measure of the absence of warmth or light. I think the same thing applies to empathy…
No, evil is simply flawed logic. In other words, stupid people.
Many of the Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were undeniably smart in the sense that they could perform abstract reasoning better than most people. Some of them had top 1% IQs and none of them had below average IQs (yes, IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence, but at the same time, anyone who gets a 130 on an IQ test is smart… They just might not be smarter than someone with a 120 or a 110 from a different background).
I’ve had a long (25 years so far) and successful career in computational science/engineering. Everyone I have worked with in the last 25 year, with only 2 exceptions I can think of, was smarter than most people. I have heard some truly awful things come out of coworkers mouths. Particularly in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. People who could write software that accurately predicted airflow through jet engines who did not care that the people of Iraq were not the same people who attacked the WTC. They knew, but did not care! They simply wanted to lash out at brown people in the middle east.
No, empathy is the distinguishing characteristic.
Even “Smart” people are pretty stupid and make mistakes all the time, and most don’t respect truth enough to self correct. Empathy is a decision, and making that decision requires being able to make correct choices.
Smart doesn’t mean logical/rational. Logic doesn’t require much intelligence.
Empathy doesn’t reliably prevent people from doing wrong: injustices are often defended with irrational appeals to emotion, partiality, & selective reasoning.
I don’t think you understand what empathy is. Why are you bringing up irrational appeals to emotion?
I don’t think you understand what empathy is.
Maybe your empathy is failing.
People can feel how others feel. That doesn’t mean they’ll morally reason well, have the integrity to defend it, or not use those feelings to justify irrational injustices even if they mean well. People are susceptible to biases that empathy alone won’t defend against.
The comment you link to does do a better job of explaining what you’re getting at, but I would still argue that those behaviors also require a partitioning of empathy, and that is a behavior most humans are susceptible to… Those who have empathy can often be made to shut it down or partition it so that it only applies to certain people.
I stand by my original comment modulo the part that asserts that it is empathy. It is not a lack of intelligence being the point.
I agree it is not intelligence, either. However, the comment above didn’t make it about intelligence: they called out flawed logic, and they called failure to uphold logic an instance of stupidity. Logic & consistency are more about commitment & insistence than intelligence.
Sophisticated work can take considerable intellect to produce & defend yet be maddeningly stupid in flouting general coherence & integrity. Abstract example: non-heliocentric models strained under increasingly sophisticated math (greater intellectual demand) yet are stupid compared to heliocentric models (better parsimony & more consistent with the rest of classical mechanics).
There’s also the phenomenon of smart stupidity where people (smart in specific areas) apply their intelligence irrationally: intelligence can be stupid. When people with a compatible morality arrive to unjust positions inconsistent with straightforward moral reasoning (through partiality or elaborate rationalization), some may call that flawed logic maddeningly stupid regardless of the intelligence it took to get there.
Moral reasoning takes logic, it’s not merely an exercise in empathy. Cases inevitably arise with multiple considerations where emotions conflict & not everyone can be satisfied: empathy alone will not settle them & moral judgement is necessary. Insistence on consistent reasoning & follow through despite challenges is integrity. The Milgram experiments show that even as people express empathetic distress & stall with questions, too many of them will obey orders to administer the maximum electric shock to someone they think they had shocked to unconsciousness. They had empathy & felt compromised, but they needed integrity.
Yeah, stupid people who lack empathy only get to run for the Republican ticket!
What’s so ridiculous is empathy is an evolutionary trait. It increases group fitness. Not that these psychos care about reality getting in the way of their shitty views.
a lot of people who attained to positions of power despite being laughably unqualified did so by being ruthless, entirely self-serving, and devoid of any kind of ethical principles. can’t get any of that with empathy weighing you down
Its unfortunate that we (or our ancestors) have structured society and institutions in a way that rewards those traits. Makes one wonder when we would need to consider a restructuring of sorts.
That was on purpose. Most revolutions (including the American revolution) have been coopted by elites who desire to have control over people.
Gee, this Musk fellow seems more and more like a Nazi, eh?
I mean, it’s not like he did multiple Nazi salutes publicly, on-stage to celebrate the election of a fascist, racist president…
reads news
Whaaaaaaaat!?
Worse, a Nazi on Ketamine, Mushrooms, Ecstacy and Adderall. Even Hitler was only on Meth and some type of barbiturate to help him sleep.
Hitler was on SOOOO much more than that.
In this list, only Adderall might have negative effects on empathy. Ketamine is neutral. And Shrooms and MDMA would even increase empathy.
There are edge cases ofcourse but the drugs themselves don’t mean much in terms of a change in empathy.
The drug that has the most negative impact on empathy is money, and that is his primary addiction.
Now that is a fact.
While I’m perfectly ok with saying Musk is a Nazi, I think I’ll draw a line here. I don’t think Musk is worse than Hitler was. I know, I’m a radical thinker.
But who knows – Musk still has some time in the race. But it does seem like his political contributions have come to an end.
It’s also the removal of responsibility
I can’t remember where I read it but it came from the administrators of the Nuremberg Trials and their dealings with Nazi criminals they were interviewing and trying to prosecute.
Basically … most people everywhere have a degree of empathy for the things that are happening around them and to other people. There are psychopaths that really don’t care what they do to other people but they are not the norm.
Instead many people can more easily justify doing things to other people if they can remove their responsibility.
- A leader, administrator or politician can remove their responsibility by saying that they asked for something to be done but they didn’t do the thing because someone else carried out the order - so it is the underlings responsibility because they followed the order.
- A follower or low level participant can remove their responsibility by saying that they were just following orders - they aren’t responsible because they were told to do these things.
Both groups want to believe that they had no responsibility and so they aren’t to blame.
It’s always been like that and it’s still happening now
A follower or low level participant can remove their responsibility by saying that they were just following orders - they aren’t responsible because they were told to do these things.
I think this one is the one they’re using more and more in their favor. Young 18 year old National Guardsman aren’t as likely to fight back and wouldn’t know what to do if they did. Who would represent them? How would their family be treated. They have their entire life ahead of them, are they sabotaging it?
For the rest of us, how would we survive without jobs? Who would pay for the lawyer?
It’s a great thing that the bigger the protest, the more likely for change.
Don’t believe the doubters: protest still has power
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.
Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.
Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field. They primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals both within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities. A regime change resulting from foreign military intervention would not be considered a success, for instance. A campaign was considered violent, meanwhile, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, the destruction of infrastructure – or any other physical harm to people or property.
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
Friendly reminder to everybody that the researcher behind this study said a few years later that they never meant for people to take this as a magical number that guarantees a victory (like most people espouse it as), but that a general strike that involves 3.5% of the population is enough to cripple an economy and force concessions from the ruling government. It’s economic violence instead of guns.
Nor does this mean that being prepared to support and defend your community is a bad idea. MLK credited the Black Panthers for allowing him to be able to do what he and the protesters did, and it wasn’t until billions of dollars in property damage that crippled entire city districts was done that the Civil Rights Bill was drafted and signed into law.
You need to source that
Friendly reminder to everybody that the researcher behind this study said a few years later that they never meant for people to take this as a magical number that guarantees a victory (like most people espouse it as),
It’s the same reason it’s so easy for people to ignore the horrors of animal AG. They’re not the ones doing it, so naturally it’s easier to ignore and rationalise
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” –Elon Musk
Thank you for posting this, OP. This is something we should all keep in mind.
In a speech in the 20s, Hitler was complaining about German soldiers who were kept as POWs long after French, English, and American troops had been released. He blamed this on the Jews, who he considered to be in charge of Wiemar Germany.
To this point he said that one day he’d see the Jews in camps; to see how they like it. Hitler recognized the Jewish people’s capacity to suffer. That was the point.
The Sadist must be empathetic. How can you enjoy someone’s suffering if you can’t recognize it?
The truth is that empathy is present and necessary for the worst kinds of Evil.
if i observe that my computer “wants” more disk space to run better is that empathetic?
psychopaths put a lot of effort into understanding how normal people think and feel to mimic it… it’s not empathy.
sadism is about power over people… it’s not empathizing with their suffering, it’s controlling it and owning the other person….Recognizing what people feel and feeling what other people feel are two vastly different things.
I like to point to this video, as it made me understand the psychology of sociopaths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWNnmymMc4
I disagree, I can see trump uncomfortable with people making fun of him to his face or ask “nasty” questions. I feel nothing and I’m generally an empathetic person. I can recognize it without feeling anything about it.
