Lacking empathy is the last thing people should want from their leaders.
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This is what is meant by "socialism or barbarism"
the fundamental weakness is spoiled rich brats like yourself with entitlement issues.
[…] But what came next in the conversation may shine more of a light on what motivates Musk to cut down the size of government, and it melds with his takeover, purchase and founding of companies in the private sector. It’s the belief that empathy for individuals is costly to the collective.
Musk pointed to California’s move to provide medical insurance even to undocumented people who qualify for its low-income Medi-Cal program.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said, borrowing the term from Gad Saad, a Canadian scholar who is also a frequent Rogan host.
While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Empathy, he said, has been “weaponized.”
It’s an important thing to remember as Musk turns his crusade toward the US government. While President Donald Trump has said cuts will not touch safety net programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, except to root out fraud, Musk made clear during the interview that he believes that the concept of Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.”
Musk’s lack of empathy is a theme in the recent biography for which the writer Walter Isaacson was given access to the billionaire throughout his takeover of Twitter.
And Musk’s disregard for individuals employed at his companies is also a throughline in the book, including on production lines at Tesla and at SpaceX, where he is described as quick to fire people.
At each of those companies, Musk expressed a desire to save humanity: with electric cars in the case of Tesla; by making humanity interplanetary in the case of SpaceX; and by sticking up for the First Amendment in the case of Twitter.
“He likes this notion of helping humanity,” Isaacson told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2023. “In fact, he has more empathy for humanity in general than he often has for the 20 people around him.
Musk still has that view of himself as a superhero taking risks; he repeatedly told Rogan about his fear of being killed. Now, instead of saving humanity, he believes he is saving the US government by cutting billions of dollars in spending, even if it impacts many Americans’ daily lives — by costing them their jobs or by curtailing government services — in the process.
From the CNN article “Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy”
It’s the belief that empathy for individuals is costly to the collective.
Or as the Nazis put it:
"Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles" (you are nothing, your people is everything)
and in public health, almost the opposite has been proven for like a century+
No part of fascist ideology has any basis in reality.
it aspires to solipsism, and material reality is the enemy, but also, they do tend to onboard with something at least tangentially related to real grievances like 'you haven't kept up with the world and don't really understand the way a lot of people understand themselves and each other these days' or 'there is a plague and that is scary', it's just that the next and every subsequent step is something like 'be one with the plague, become the fear #darkknight#batman' and/or 'and your daughter likes kissing other girls because the jewish space laser made her gay, so we must #exterminatethejews'.
fun fact about the 'jewish' space laser: the only attempt anyone ever made to build a world dominating (network of) space laser(s) was their guy back in the 80s. i'd bet money some part of the idea was a leftover from werner von braun.
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
Captain G.M. Gilbert
The army psychologist assigned to interview the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.
Thank you for posting this. I first saw this quote decades ago and it has been on my mind more the last few years. Through Trump 1.0, COVID, Trump 2.0 and the return of Nazis, it’s a caution not to lose our connection to each other no matter how they try to divide us and pit us against each other.
I think there's multiple different types of "evil". What you're referring to is "sociopathy": An utter disregard for human life.
Gilbert himself didn't seem sure he had a complete definition, just a critical piece of it. As a psychologist he would have understood sociopathy well, among other psychological maladies. He seems to be making a distinction here, but that is my reading of him. If he could have provided a diagnosis that underpinned becoming a Nazi it would have been a bombshell, but they all seemed rather normal under a battery of tests. Instead of a specific diagnosis, the Banality of Evil became the commonly cited mechanism behind the Nazi's abhorrent acts. Weak men following vile leaders.
After thinking about Gilbert's quote I have come to conclude a lack of empathy is a necessary, if not sufficient condition for evil. There may be more to it, but this piece is already enough to oppose evil, and challenging on its own.
You know what kind of people lack empathy? Psychopaths. Narcissists. You know, assholes.
And republicans
But you repeat yourself...
Cluster B Personality Disorders is just medicalized terminology for “evil assholes.”
Too broad of a brush stroke. BPD isn't as toxic as NPD or ASPD. Even within NPD there are variations of toxicity. Cluster B's nickname is the "dramatic and erratic" cluster, and some of what falls within there is much more about trauma fallout than evil megalomania.
As someone who was the target of BPD rage for years, I say, from experience, that BPD can be every bit as dangerous and potentially life-destroying as NPD or ASPD.
I stand by what I said.
BPD isn’t as toxic as NPD or ASPD.
Maybe not as toxic, but as someone who fell for and dated a girl with BPD (who wasn't diagnosed until years after we broke up), I can tell you from experience: it's brutal.
To clarify for anyone reading who doesn't know the acronym, BPD is Borderline Personality Disorder, not Bipolar Disorder.
Or, to be more charitable, a scientific attempt to understand what it is that makes someone become a clinical asshole, in hopes of "curing" assholes.
A noble, if futile effort.
Nazis
That is liteally something that you would read in a children story and go "damn the villain is a little one dimensional aren't they".
Always been told that one-dimensional characters are boring and unrealistic
..and yet here we are
God, I wish this shit were boring
It’s something a Sith would say to his apprentice
lol wut? Empathy is the literal definition of what makes up civilization. People breaking their legs and others taking care instead of feeding the wolves.
‘Sorry granny president musk told us to yeet you in the swamp’
What a dipshit
Fuck Musk, but your comment is making a major factual error.
Empathy being the result of civilisation is a common faultline. Which follows the sort of civilisational narrative popularised by the romans of barbarism vs civilisation to justify their imperialist conquests, and then officialised by philosophers like Hobbes with his writings on the “State of Nature”, further pushed in europe and asia to justify things like colonialism and characterise it as a selfless act of bringing civilisation to people.
But modern knowledge shows this a very faulty way of thinking. Empathy existed much before “civilisation”. Nomadic and Gatherer-Hunter Tribes were often more egalitarian are more “caring” than early state based societies. The archeological record is full of evidence for this.
In fact, if you asked an anthropologist, I bet they would make the argument that early states, which led to the first records of things like slavery and domination, was a step back in empathy.
Musk said that? Wtf? =.=
At first i didn't believe it when my coworker told me "lots of businesses have a natural lifetime of 20 years. After that, they enshittify." I thought he was making it up.
Now, however, i believe it. Seeing how Google has started massively enshittifying its products around 2020, roughly 20 years after its inception, after providing good service for sth like 20 years (think 2012 Youtube), and Musk starting to be a rampant asshole, after having put out tweets such as this one:
as recently as in 2018.
How can someone still trust anything coming out of his mouth..
Typical seller, just say what you think people want to hear, no matter the truth..
Had to look it up, but apparently yes.
So that means not only is he a threat to our species, he's unaware that he's a threat to our species?
He thinks he's the good guy
wow. He never grew beyond 12 yrs old it seems. This is the same type of thinking that leads you to say that we should cull our elderly and disabled because they're a drain on society. Or forceful eugenics. No wonder he's also obsessed with the birth rate.
Is there a name for this? Narcissistic Hero syndrome?
hes trying to act pseudo-intellectual, much like J peterson and shapiro.
yeah he's a piece of shit. Fuck Musk.
No empathy for Elon Musk
Who hurt you, Elon?
nobody ever, and that's the problem. could still be fixed, but an ounce of prevention is worth a megaton of cure.