“Empathy is for losers”, says the guy whose lack of empathy has lost him about 250 billion dollars in the last couple of weeks.
Sorry, make that $260 billion…
$270 billion…
No, wait.
$280 billion…
Well, I could go on, just like the sell-off in Tesla shares. Elon Musk, the self-driving car crash in human form, has coughed up yet another of his trillions of daily aerosolised brain droplets, this one declaring that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy.”
Western Civilisation, or what remains of it on the internet, has hit back with, naturally, a meme, based on, naturally, a great quote that isn’t real.
It’s a pity that the Hannah Arendt grab is made up because it feels incredibly true, or at least ’truthy’ to borrow from Stephen Colbert.
If you have even a passing familiarity with her work, the idea of Arendt sitting in on the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg, chewing her 2B pencil and going, “I dunno, Eichmann, you tried snuffing out human empathy, dude, and like two minutes later, three tops, there’s like barbarians all over your fucking culture,”… well, it feels very on point.
Sissy SpaceX, by way of contrast, sounds deranged. Probably because Musk squeezed out this intellectual brainfart on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is what we have now instead of rigorous public discourse, the scientific method or literally any system of iterative knowledge development that doesn’t involve a shaved gorilla taking hits off the crazy bong while Temu Tony Stark explains why fluoride is mind control.
Musk’s position does have the virtue of clarity: empathy, he insists, is making us weak. It’s the Trojan horse through which naive do-gooders allow in the deadly feely virus. If we keep up this nonsense—helping the poor, considering the feelings of others, researching a cure for childhood brain cancers—before you know it, the West will collapse under the unbearable weight of basic human decency.
The troll king of the singularity appears to have been inspired by Gad Saad, an academic who is ‘credited’ with coining the term ‘suicidal empathy’ to describe what happens ‘when societies care too much.’ It’s the kind of deep thought that gets thrown around a lot on podcasts hosted by men who drink raw eggs and psyllium husk slurry for breakfast and refer to their ex-wives as “females.”
Naturally, the good doctor said nothing of the sort.
Dr. Saad, a professor of evolutionary psychology, was trying to describe a specific phenomenon, not simply a vibe such as “societies who care too much”. His original concept is more nuanced than the self-anointed God-emperor of Mars’ least-habitable crater let on, and he refers to situations where empathy is misdirected or becomes excessive to the point of harming the very societies offering it.
Saad’s work suggests that in certain cases, empathy can be extended inappropriately to perpetrators or those who might exploit it, potentially at the expense of victims or society at large. You want a bit less pointyhead with that? Saad suggests that sometimes we can get so carried away extending the empathy hand-out to the wrong people—like those who’d happily bite it off—that we forget about who’s actually hurting or at fault. It’s like giving your last life jacket to the guy who just poked a hole in your boat.
Example?
How about a liberal institutionalist appointed to, say, the role of a nation’s top legal officer, who is so careful not to inflame the butthurt sensibilities of a would-be tyrant and his barbarian horde that he dithers and quivers and generally wets the bed for two years after the tyrant launches a violent coup attempt before deciding, long after time has run out, to do something about it. But in the meantime, the tyrant and his horde, which have been galloping at full speed towards the capitol…
Oh, wait, no.
The would-be tyrant is your king now. Oops. But that is some top-shelf suicidal empathy for ya, right there.
Real empathy isn’t about opening the gates to chaos. It’s not even about understanding different perspectives. It is about understanding that different perspectives exist and making rational, informed decisions based on that knowledge.
At a personal level, it means listening to the voice inside you whispering, “It’s not all about me.”
Some people, of course, don’t heed the voice. They’re either deaf to it or they just ignore it.
Psychopaths and malignant narcissists are numbered among the former, but their numbers are probably few. Unfortunately, the latter, the ignorant, are legion, and their ranks are made up of the malign, the selfish, the cowardly, as well as the foolish, the gullible and the misled.
Most folks, in other words.
There’s a reason why totalitarian regimes go out of their way to stomp out empathy. If you wish to pursue the commission of atrocities as policy, you must first ensure the moral collapse of the people you need to carry out those atrocities.
Otherwise, you risk them asking inconvenient questions.
This post first appeared on John Birmingham’s Alien Sideboob. You can read the original here.
He no longer tweets, having deleted his account, but you can catch him on Bluesky as Birmo.bsky.social
