I have previously characterised conservatism as primarily a lack of empathy. This quote does not bode well for America.
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.
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
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….
What would you call someone who commits a horrible crime, feels bad about it and does it again?
Wow, Satan, haven’t seen you drop character before.
I guess from ‘your’ point of view, I’d call them good company.
=P
You see this with zionists and in Israel
Thank you for posting this, OP. This is something we should all keep in mind.
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 🤷♂️
To psychopaths everyone else is a NPC.
I used to get a kick out of referring to strangers as NPCs…
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’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!?
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
recently it was discussed that autistic people also struggle with empathy.
Autistic people do not struggle with empathy.
They struggle with being perceived as expressing empathy, and they struggle with others not being empathetic toward them, instead just feigning it or using it as a manipulation tactic, which autists are much more likely to recognize as such.
People tend to sympathize, not empathize, with autists.
These are not the same thing.
No, evil is simply flawed logic. In other words, stupid people.
Yeah, stupid people who lack empathy only get to run for the Republican ticket!
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.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” –Elon Musk
This is just me speaking from a contemporary point of view. Maybe part of the equation is a struggle to have a comfortable life and then seeing a limited sample of others who are better off whether through a combination of hard work and good luck, or see some people gaming the system with impunity. A lot of arguments I hear about those sympathetic to conservative talking points often have anecdotal experiences of seeing people abuse welfare or allegedly not pay taxes because they’re undocumented workers.
“Why should I support those illegals when my tax dollars go to help them when they don’t pay tax themselves?”
“I’ve seen people who can’t speak English buy steak and lobster with food stamps.”
This resentment can then grow from continuous exposure to biased media portraying some bad actors burning or looting in protests. At that point it doesn’t matter what actually caused the protests, because they’ve generalized all those people to be thugs undeserving of being listened to. After that, minorities are seen as a nuisance that must be rid of at all costs. It doesn’t matter if they’re documented or not, they must be bad because the police are arresting and hurting them.
I don’t have a good way to defuse their anger. They are right that some people in the minority act like criminals. They don’t want to separate the good from the bad and just want to get rid of everyone whom the media and those in their echo chamber say are causing trouble.
But if I’m right and they’re wrong then it’s ok.
/S
