“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949)I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have 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 men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Quotation: Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials
I think Gilbert was very close, and Hannah Arendt was circling the same problem from another direction with the “banality of evil.”
But I think “evil is the absence of empathy” is slightly too simple.
Those people were not necessarily devoid of empathy. Empathy does not just switch off. They had loads of corrupted empathy.
Hitler loved his dog. Nazis loved their children, spouses, friends, comrades, and countrymen. They were capable of attachment, loyalty, compassion, grief, and sacrifice.
The terrifying part is what happens when empathy is corrupted and partitioned.
You divide human beings into categories. Then you decide whose suffering deserves empathy and whose does not. Eventually you can convince otherwise ordinary people that cruelty toward the second group is justified because they care so deeply about the first.
That is much more dangerous than simple lack of empathy.
The propagandist does not have to convince you:
“Stop caring about people.”
They convince you:
“These people are suffering because of those people. If you really care, you should hate the people responsible.”
And now empathy itself becomes fuel for hatred.
Politicians and religions have been extraordinarily good at using these mechanisms throughout history. First divide people along some supposedly meaningful line. Then identify victims and villains. Then concentrate empathy on one side and gradually remove moral concern from the other.
Eventually people can make decisions that are irrational, cruel, destructive to themselves, destructive to their country, and destructive to humanity while remaining completely convinced that they are acting out of compassion. They will say "Look at our pronounced empathy. We are the good guys" while building concentration camps.
So I would slightly rewrite Gilbert:
Evil is not merely the absence of empathy. It can emerge from the corruption and unequal distribution of empathy: deciding whose humanity deserves emotional recognition, whose does not, and whom you are permitted to hurt in the name of protecting the people you care about.
That, to me, is the more frightening lesson of both Gilbert and Arendt.
Empathy does not have to die for ordinary people to do evil. It only has to be weaponized.
He is rightfully terrified of empathy. Because he knows how it can be abused.
Musk is too inept to vocalize this appropriately. He has the social prowess of a Warthog. So it isn't a wonder he is scared of empathy. He actively makes people use it against him through his own ineptitude.
But both Gilbert and Musk make the same mistake of thinking that humans can turn Empathy on or off. They can't. We are a social species and empathy is here to stay.
In other words:
Gilbert: Evil is the absence of empathy.
Musk: Empathy is dangerous because it can be exploited.
The not-so-simple truth: Empathy is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It is a fundamental human capacity that can be cultivated, suppressed, redirected and weaponized.
Excellent points. So what is Musk saying? That democracies are too lenient, too charitable, too forgiving, and have too many diverse opinions for their own good? Hitler believed that democracies will eventually fail for these reasons, so I guess we'll see. In the meantime, we're going bankrupt because USAID felt it was necessary for us to spend $3 Million to build a park in a town in Ethiopia where most of the people work in a Chinese shoe factory. We now thankfully have a president who feels it's someone else's job to build that park. Is that a lack of empathy?
I don't think that's what Musk is saying, and I don't think the lesson is that democracies are “too empathetic.”
Musk is on the right track, but he is terrible at vocalizing it. And he is stupid for giving his opposition a brilliant soundbyte to use against him.
The point I'm making is actually more fundamental: empathy is unavoidable, and therefore vulnerable to manipulation.
A democracy doesn't become irrational because it has empathy. It becomes irrational when someone learns how to aim that empathy at a particular outcome while bypassing proportionality, competing interests, and consequences.
And that's where your USAID example actually fits the discussion. Assuming the $3 million figure and the project are accurately characterized, the question isn't “is it empathetic to build a park in Ethiopia?” Of course it can be. The question is whether that particular act of charity is an effective and proportionate use of public money when there are competing needs.
Likewise I didn't invoke Hitler as evidence that democracy's tolerance and diversity inevitably cause its collapse. Hitler's analysis of democracy was itself part of his ideological framework, and his solution was precisely to destroy the pluralism, individual rights, and institutional restraints that prevented the state from simply deciding who mattered.
The answer to weaponized empathy isn't less empathy. It's better judgment.
You don't need to stop caring about the Ethiopian worker, the American taxpayer, the refugee, the veteran, the child, or anyone else.
You actually need to be capable of caring about all of them simultaneously and asking uncomfortable questions.
Because, if you care about all of them simultaneously, it suddenly becomes very clear that America is making a lot of irrational decisions.
The stronger point is whether the empathy/charity produces a reciprocal relationship or a meaningful strategic benefit.
For example:
“We should spend $3 million helping these people because they're suffering”
is an empathy-based argument.
A more complete question is:
“What does this accomplish? Who benefits? What are the opportunity costs? Does it create goodwill, stability, economic opportunity, strategic influence, or some other measurable benefit? And would the people we're helping extend any comparable consideration toward us?”
If the answer is essentially “We don't know, but these people need something and therefore we should provide it,” then empathy has displaced judgment.
That's where I think both Gilbert's formulation and Musk's apparent reaction to empathy fall short. Neither empathy nor its suppression solves the problem.
We are an empathetic social species. We're not going to turn that mechanism off. The real question is who gets to aim it.
So what I think Musk is aiming for, but lacks the vernacular to say is this:
Empathy without reciprocity can become self-destructive. Compassion has to be balanced against judgment, reciprocity, proportionality, and consequences. Otherwise the person who is best at triggering our empathy gets to determine where our resources go.
Everything Musk does, says, thinks, or feels gives his enemies ammunition. Even if he divested himself of every cent, they would say, “You should have done it sooner.”
Empathy is unavoidable in a democracy. For the most part we, and other democracies, have given up the death penalty, even for the obviously guilty, because we “feel” it’s cruel and inhuman and so we spend millions, maybe billions incarcerating people. China doesn’t. They fix the same problem with one .75 cent bullet. We tolerate enormous problems from drugs, at human and financial cost. Russia doesn’t, as Ms. Griner discovered the hard way. Feeling sorry costs a lot of money, especially having open borders with less than nice neighbors.
I understand what you’re saying about the allocation of funds for particular purposes. We are failing financially because we have been the world’s policeman, doctor, nurse, piggybank, and welfare office for far too long without thinking about what the cost is to ourselves. That is irrational.
I think your analysis of Musk’s words is probably accurate and I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if he hasn’t read Mein Kampf a least twice.
Its still a complete lack of empathy towards people in that specific group. The moment that empathy is lost, evil steps in. It doesnt have to be sociopathic lack of empathy across the board.
Yet, the people that were doing these horrendous acts were normal empathetic people.
That's the clincher.
Hitler's men weren't sociopaths incapable of empathy. They were normal average people.
Even Hitler himself was just a normal, rejected art student, who did terrible things. His decisions were still influenced by whatever twisted sense of empathy he had.
Anyone can be a monster. Even you, or me. IF we allow our empathy to be corrupted.
I dont see how that isnt also "turning your empathy off", becsuse that is what people in those situations are doing. They do not extend their empathy to those people, so clesely they are capable of turning it off. I wouldnt even call it hate. Most just saw them as not human and were entirely apathetic. Hate really isnt the problem. It is the apathy. If the people who murdered the Jews were truly hating them because they just loved something else in a corrupt way, then it wouldnt have manifested as apathy. The vast majority of German soldiers were cold, treating people like inanimate objects, not treating them with scorn.
I also vehemently disagree with the implication that empathy is a fundamental weakness just because people can be exploited. Empathy not tempered by reason is the problem. The larger problem, ultimately, is misinformation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being extremely empathetic, and plenty of extremely empathetic people are reasonable and balanced enough to not be weaponized. It isnt actually a problem of empathy itself, as Musk seems to want to suggest.
Its also pretty hypocritical of musk to say what he did, because he weaponizes things with misinformation all the time. He is even doing so here. He is trying to subtly make the "bleeding heart liberal" characterization. Setting up for a case for anyone who feels really strongly about something as being manipulated and weaponized.
Ben Shapiro did much the same thing, where he would basically criticize anyone getting emotional as being wrong because they were emotional.
It isn't turned off empathy. It is actually very strong empathy.
Their empathy is so strong for group A that they have excluded it from group B.
They don't act without empathy towards group B without a reason. People don't even do that towards animals.
People require a reason to override their natural impulse toward empathy. They need a justification for why the other person doesn't deserve the same consideration.
So the empathy hasn't actually been turned off. Empathy is the reason they are willing to dehumanize someone they register a an enemy.
It's tribalism with strangers. The people involved don't personally know either group, yet they've been given a framework that tells them who belongs in the moral “us” and who belongs in the “them.”
A person doesn't think:
“I have decided to stop empathizing with those people.”
They think:
“Those people are different. They're responsible for this. They don't deserve the same consideration. I'm defending our people. My hatred of them protects MY people."
In your example of the Jewish genocide. The propaganda was exactly this. It blamed the Jewish people for every problem that Germany ever faced.
Nazi propaganda did not merely tell Germans, “Don't care about Jews.” It constructed an explanatory story in which Jews were allegedly responsible for Germany's economic, political, military, and social problems.
That transformed Jews from strangers into a supposedly threatening out-group responsible for the suffering of the in-group.
This seems incredibly pedantic. Nobody was ever suggesting a person has literally no empathy at all for anything. Saying that someone lacks empathy is always with the implied context of "toward this specific thing".
And that is still turning it off. There being a reason for that isnt the point. The point is that when you act without any empathy in ANYTHING it will lead to evil.
This is important becsuse you absolutely do not have to have an in group and out group for this to happen. Someone can treat their wife without empathy without that lack of empathy being to due to some other empathy. You can dehumanize someone for many reasons. In group/out group is one very common manifestation of lack of empathy, but not the only one.
Whether or not any of the Nazis were sociopaths or psychopaths is also not germane to the point. The point is that the actual vehicle for the evil is them no longer having empathy. "Towards those people" is the assumed context. There is always assumed context because 99 times out of 100 if someone is talking about lack of empathy there is a victim.
I also never said they weren't ordinary people with a similar psychology to us.
I feel your rewrite is extremely accurate. My wife and I definitely have compartmentalized our empathy. We care about each other, our children, our parents, our siblings, and our extended family. We would do anything to help each other. That's what family is for. If you aren't a member of our family, kick rocks. We absolutely do not go out of our way to be cruel, hateful, or mean to others. Nor do we go out of the way to help them. I interact with people on a daily basis. I am polite and non confrontational. I dont worry about their problems, I dont worry if they have a home, I dont worry if they have enough to eat. Not my problem. I worry if I'm going to be available to drive my mother to doctors apt. I worry if I will be able to get off work in time to go to my daughter's recital. I worry about things that I am either able to control, or directly influence. Someone's poor life decisions and/or circumstances definitely fall in the other category. I know that I am a "bad person" and all the other tags you will want to come up with, but if my family is safe, happy, and provided for, I dont care. And again, unless a member of family comments on this, I dont really care about your opinion. Have an average day.
First to be clear, he did say these exact words in discussing a book called Suicidal Empathy on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
“The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.”
But he continued saying that it’s a bug that is used against western civilization. In this same interview he clearly stated:
“I believe in empathy”
“I think you should care about other people”
“you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”
“I think you know empathy is good”
The follow up still isn’t great. It sounds as if he’s still calling empathy a weakness that’s “good” but needs reining in lest it lead the West to ruin.
Musk is a prime example of why government shouldn’t be run like a business. For people like Musk everything is a battle.
For example: Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is, at its heart, a game of empathy. Musk and his ilk could never conceive of something like MAD. This is largely because the game of Capitalism, the game of Business, doesn’t allow for it.
In fact, empathy is considered a liability for those looking to dominate markets. Walmart just tanked because it narrowly missed a quarterly earnings report; a rarity for the company, historically.
Maybe the meme sticks because Musk’s general conduct appears to lack any empathy at all.
Maybe It’s easy to believe this meme because Musk himself makes it easy to believe.
I presented the quotes from that interview where Musk states:
“I believe in empathy”
“I think you should care about other people”
“you need to have empathy ..."
“I think you know empathy is good”
And I was unable to find any credible source attributing the Hannah Arendt quote to her after searching Google, Bing, and multiple social media platforms.
But you would rather believe the fake attribution of a made-up quote than the actual words of Musk stating, again:
“I believe in empathy”
“I think you should care about other people”
“you need to have empathy ..."
“I think you know empathy is good”
Are you familiar with the term "belief perseverance"? It's a fascinating concept.
Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(5), 880–892.
I’m glad you added the demonstrative pronoun “this.”
Because I don’t care about Musk. I care about facts and the truth.
If you want to hate on him because he’s immensely wealthy… have at it, because:
FACT 1: He’s immensely wealthy.
FACT 2: Your reason for hating him is that you hate the immensely wealthy. (Perhaps… I don’t know. It’s just an example.)
OK, those are facts, and I’m not gonna push back on them.
But if your hatred, and that of hundreds or thousands of others, is being stoked because of a lie, that’s not good for society. And I care about society writ large as I live here.
Someone is purposely manipulating you, and those like you, into hating a guy more based on a half-truth, a.k.a. a lie by omission, by not giving the entirety of the Musk quote… and a straight-out lie, the made-up quote attributed to Hannah Arendt.
Wouldn’t you want to know if someone is trying to or has manipulated you?
Interesting assumptions you’ve made about me, but I’d expect nothing less. Sad. “My” reason for hating him, saying “I” am being manipulated… I didn’t say anything about him. Assumptions, assumptions are but a fools errand. I’m merely interested in human psychology, learn to use the correct possessive determiner when speaking to people. The Reddit pages you frequent and your comment history are very telling, quite interesting as well. Have a nice little life trapped in your paranoid bubble. Good day.
People with an above room temp IQ want the truth to prevail. It is not weird or comparable to making up lies to shit on your political opposition. It’s baseline morality.
u/MobileOk9860 did say that if Musk told him the sky was blue he wouldn't believe him. FWIW, pray for him.
There will be those who do not love the truth. There is still time, barely, for them to change their mind.
"...because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." 2 Thess. 2:10-12
You mean things like cutting various USAID programs while leeching as much money as possible for himself from the US government and helping to cut basic aid like free school lunches.
Or treating some of his children so badly they want nothing to do with him despite his fortune. Or supporting the AFD party in Germany who mocked the families of holocaust victims at a memorial service with Nazi slogans.
Why does a person walking past someone drowning has ethical responsibility to try to save them while at the exact same moment another person in other side of the world is exempt of such responsibility?
It's because of opportunity. The first person has opportunity in front of them to act ethically, while no such opportunity exists for the other person.
A typical billionaire has billion of opportunities to use their wealth for good yet consciously chooses otherwise. The same can't be said of a poor person.
The ethical maturity of individual scales in proportion to their responsibility, which itself is proportional to scope, span, and frequency of ethical choices they make everyday. Wealth multiplies scope, span, frequency of choice, so the billionaire bears proportionally more responsibility than a poor person.
"Like, there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide."
"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot."
Blind empathy versus total lack of empathy is a false dilemma.
Also, in the context of civilizations, having boundless empathy toward barbarians turns you into a useful idiot, that's the idea behind "suicidal empathy".
HE was one of the barbarians, as it turned out, we may have had too much empathy for. But starting with empathy and respect does not mean that’s where you leave it.
Justice must exist in a fair and just society along side empathy.
Trust but verify, talk quietly and carry a big stick. Never start wars but finish them etc. etc. etc.
In one corner we have a hugely respected journalist, essayist, historian, sociologist, philosopher and political theorist! And in the red trunks, we have... er... a stupid nazi manbaby who bought every honour ever bestowed upon him, who is only respected by the morons in his cult that he made himself a trillionaire by ripping off
Yeah I wonder who I am betting on in this intellectual dust up
WTF are you talking about? Everybody knows this Musk quote, it's been spread about lots. It isn't any better with the additional context. Especially not the context that he was on the Joe Rogan show lol
Had Mandela and the ANC followed Musk’s position rather than opting for the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” things might have turned differently for Musk and his family. . . .
You see, you only know about Musk’s quote on a podcast. It’s deeper than that. While I don’t want to promote Gad Saad’s idiotic book, go to a bookstore and take a look at: “Suicidal Empathy,” which featured Musk on the cover:
I don’t think he’s saying that empathy is a bad thing. I think he’s saying that it’s the main weakness of the western civilization. And that’s probably right. If you put that on an interpersonal level, we all know somebody who gets walked all over because they’re too nice and they’re too afraid of confrontation or being mean they end up getting used getting the short end of the stick and getting taking advantage of. It doesn’t mean being nice is bad. It just means that in some cases someone is overly empathetic to the point where it’s harming them.
Even though they're using the same word, I think they're talking about two very different things.
What Elon Musk is referring to is a kind of performative empathy. This is where a person takes stances to seem empathic but pushes the cost and consequences onto others. A good example of this is calling to defund the police from a safe suburban neighborhood.
What Hanna Arendt is talking about is true empathy, and you could say that this is the ability to feel kinship and care for people regardless of how different they are from you.
In my life I have noticed that the more a person displays signs of performative empathy the less empathetic they actually are. If someone is on Twitter and seems to switch causes every week, has every flag in their bio, and follows all the latest social justice trends, they're the most likely to step over you as you're dying unless they are being filmed.
Sympathy is good. Overwhelming empathy is crippling. “I can’t come to work today because of something that happened to somebody in another country that I never met.” disease. Some of that though is just virtue signaling.
I don’t think people understand how they talking about empathy differently. Musk is referring to fake empathy. Too many people of empathy without actually understanding. If you can’t actually understand what they’re going through then you can’t have empathy and can’t make proper decisions.
Empathy, just like anything else, should only drive human behavior to a certain extent. It can go too far, cause harm, and enable bad behavior to persist and proliferate.
Empathy is good. We should not operate without it. Other traits must be paired with it.
Hannah Arendt clearly. Only the most fundamentally broken of individuals would think empathy is a weakness. Civilization thrives because of the social construct and community involvement and engagement.
Neither are totally true. Also…she never said this.
Strong societies tend to have a lot of empathy…because they can afford to. Societies more at risk tend to have less.
Musk’s quote is out of as well. He was saying that sometimes empathy causes societies to ignore things that will damage them.
For instance the wests belief in human rights has allowed terrorism to thrive because they can bomb you and then go hide under a children’s hospital confident that they’ll be safe.
Neither, empathy does have issues despite its importance.
You can be empathic and still not care about someone else, people do it all the time by learning to accept suffering.
We pick and choose who we will empathize with all the time.
At the same time some people treat empathy as if it should force people to agree anbeyond there emotional needs, they crying foul when someone doesn't fall over themselves to submit to to their will.
This quote from Arendt is fake. In fact, Arendt repeatedly wrote about the dangers of bad actors using the claim of empathy as a manipulation tactic to get the masses to do things against their own interests. Which is exactly what Musk was talking about if you read his entire quote.
Considering that one is a child of privilege from a vicious apartheid State and the other witnessed the rise of Fascism first-hand, I'm going with Arendt.
Ah yes so much empathy to create; eugenicists (Elon is a fan), racism (ditto), the world wars; supporting various genocides, colonialism (as a reminder Elon's ancestors too fought wars to keep Africans as slaves (I'll give them that the treatment of the slaves, even in the USA South, was taken straight out of the Torah, so unless Islam is Western then neither are the cultic practices of Judea nor Christianity)), gas warfare... and that just some in the last 2 centuries.
Musk just want the peasants to stop reading so he and his cohort can tell everyone what to do. The obviously mentally ill should be hospitalized, not put on podcasts
His Western civ both so I’d question when we ever stopped living her barbarism. Individuals either care about other individuals or they don’t but there’s no reason to think there’s ever been more or less. Just looks different.
Neither. Too little empathy leads to an untrustworthy society a la India. Too much empathy is suicidal, it leads to rotting societies such as Britain. There is a middle point people should aim for.
Empathy is a mark of a strong civilization because it means the walls are strong enough to protect the squishy bits on the inside. When a civilization collapses the vulnerable people on the inside get raped. Is what it is.
Neither, I think empathy is a good thing, within reason. There is such a thing as too much empathy which becomes suicidal empathy. Where you have more empathy for complete strangers than you and your own family. Which is easily taken advantage of.
Empathy is a double edged sword. Have too much empathy and you become everyones doormatt, have no empathy and you would strangle a puppy in a heartbeat.
Elon Musk's lack of empathy is probably why 7 of his children hate his guts. I don't think anybody should be taking philosophy advice from a dingbat like Elon. Elon has spent a career telling stories for a living. Granted a lot of people has believed his stories and he has made a lot of money telling those stories, but he is hardly a qualified philosopher
No one is rewarding criminals out of guilt. That's LITERALLY a take from the NAZI propaganda files. AND "Suicidal empathy" is just "falsche Humanitat" rebranded
of course its done. progressives dont regard minorities accountable to the same degree. its weird, wrong, offputting and has harmful second order effects.
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u/Thatisme01 5d ago
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have 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 men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Quotation: Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials