“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” –Elon Musk
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?
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.
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!?
I have previously characterised conservatism as primarily a lack of empathy. This quote does not bode well for America.
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
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.”
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.
What were the words of Elmo musk again? That there is too much empathy in the world? Fo figure
There is something very weary in people of “high status” or “power”. I have never met them, but just seeing pictures of people like Trump make me so uncomfortable. There is something so weird to them. I am an atheist, but there is this intuition/feeling inside of me telling me that they are some sort of devil or a dangerous person. An all around “fakeness” to them.
I have noticed this with people high in the hierarchy ladder. It could just be because I am an anarchist, I despise hierarchies and I have distrust for authority and therefore, I despise them. But ya, I feel so uncomfortable near them. It is like looking at a fake item that everyone is admiring and I am screaming internally: “Do you not see how fake it is???”.
Some statistics suggest that ~20% of corporate leaders exhibit sociopathic/psychopathic traits. The trump family was and is full of abuse, and that shapes sociopathic traits.
You’re probably getting some of that sociopath vibe from trump and other leaders. Trump being exceptionally terrible thanks to his NPD as well.
Exactly like my words. One of our politicians publicly stated that empathy is not belonging to the politics and I think why don’t people see and understand what she really said. She’s pure evil without any doubt.
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
Thank you for posting this, OP. This is something we should all keep in mind.
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.
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….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.
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
This is why dehumanization is always part of fascist propaganda. You can’t remove empathy completely from most people, but you can make them see a group as less than them and the empathatic response will be reduced. That’s why the left uses terms like undocumented immigrants versus illegal aliens. Calling them ‘illegals’ is a key step for generating the capacity in people to murder them en masse.
Whenever I hear the term “alien” for an immigrant I know that person to be extremely racist.
