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.
Gee, this Musk fellow seems more and more like a Nazi, eh?
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
INB4 "vegans bad" but I think this is also reflected in how we treat animals. I know I couldn't kill an a cow, a chicken or a pig. I see in them the same will to live in peace as I see in my fellow humans and empathy makes it so that I would see it as cruel to rob them of it.
Edit: the plants rights activists have found this comment. It's interesting, the same refusal to recognize reality, our shared reality, in which for example plants are not sentient while non-human animals are and are therefore deserving of empathy, this refusal is also at the root of fascism. People who are open to fascism refuse to recognize the reality in which a jewish person is not worse than any other person, in which immigrants aren't worse than your average neighbour down the street and in which trans people deserve as much a right to be left alone as they claim for themselves.
100% correct.
To psychopaths everyone else is a NPC.
I used to get a kick out of referring to strangers as NPCs...
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
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.
But if I'm right and they're wrong then it's ok.
/S
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yeah, stupid people who lack empathy only get to run for the Republican ticket!
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.
