Political Memes

Yes, Musk said 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.'

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

“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.

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 have previously characterised conservatism as primarily a lack of empathy. This quote does not bode well for America.

What were the words of Elmo musk again? That there is too much empathy in the world? Fo figure

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.

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???".

To psychopaths everyone else is a NPC.

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 🤷‍♂️

But if I'm right and they're wrong then it's ok.

/S

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.

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.

It's a bit of a reduction that construes offenders as alien to the rest of humanity (they're incapable of empathy), promoting a dangerous sense of immunity to the problem (I have empathy, so I'm not capable of these offenses). Seems self-serving. Better social psychologists have come along, performed revealing studies, and identified general susceptibilities in humanity to conformity, authority, diffusion of responsibility, & moral disengagement that show the problem is more relatable to humanity in general. Historical record consistently shows people's capacity for cruelty & inhumanity isn't exceptional.

The truth is we may be far more similar to people who commit atrocities than we'd like to think. It's hard to predict how someone will do unless they've actually been tested.

Emotions can & often are bent to irrational, unjust ends: empathy alone won't reliably save us from succumbing to irrationality & far worse. People also need reason & integrity to withstand challenges. These may be more important than empathy: I've seen far more emotional, irrational people being unjust than people with reason & integrity on their side.

It might be important to ask what causes people to lack empathy. Currently there seems to be a rather unscientific line of thought at least in social media that some people are just intrinsically evil.

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.

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...

What would you call someone who commits a horrible crime, feels bad about it and does it again?

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.