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I heard about a fascinating post-Holocaust study that I think is super relevant to what is going on today.
The gist of it is that the perpetrators considered themselves victims of a world conspiring against them, and the awful things they were doing were just defensive. Remind you of anyone?
The heroic helpers, people who risked themselves protecting victims, didn’t really want to do it. They just couldn’t live with themselves if they ignored the victims in need. The bystanders just wanted to keep their heads down.
The study seems too analogous to what’s happening today to ignore.
So, socio/psychopathy. You know, what capitalism extols as a virtue, rewards and what the hellscapes create.
No. That is a way of making it seem like a distant thing that has no relation to you. That is a lie you tell yourself for your own comfort.
Everyone suspends their empathy when it is convenient. I guarantee you have already done it today. You have decades of practice doing it to animals, and when the time comes that you need to do it to a human, you will know exactly how its done. No sociopathy required.
Should have use people, instead of men, but BINGO!
Scary, to ask you all, but how many people do you know apply to that standard, beyond ‘The Crazy Don’, his administration & some the opposite political party? Horror show in Rich-Super Rich Economic Classes/Owners!
Huh I would have expanded it to all sentient animals, but I agree.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Elon Musk, 2020
How would he ever have empathy? He has never suffered a day in his life. He probably can’t even imagine what it’s like
well that’s the thing innit. empathy implies the ability to feel and connect to another person regardless of shared experience.
I remember being outraged by that, not only by the evilness, but also about how easy it is to disprove.
As I said back then:
Empathy is one of society’s greatest strengths, when people fall down, others will help them up, enabling them to keep contributing to society later, this creates a flexible but strong society.
A society without empathy is a brittle society, it doesn’t bend, when someone falls down, they are left behind, and the society loses their their experience and future contributions, creating cracks. Eventually these cracks will break an unempathic society.
You can even claim that empathy is a form of selfishness, by helping other’s you make sure that there are other’s around that can help you.
TL;DR: Elon lacks basic logic.
Elon lacks empathy. If you don’t have empathy it’s like some magic fairy miracle stuff, and you don’t understand it. So you hate it.
You’re right. People like this are intentionally blind to your point though. They think anyone who falls is dead weight and should be cut loose. They are too arrogant and selfish to answer the question of where they will be cut loose. Anywhere out of sight is probably the answer if I had to guess. But the truth is even out of sight is still in society and society is a connected web. I suspect when this happens over and over and they can no longer be shielded from the horrors they have created by cutting people loose, they begin using the final solution so they no longer have to see what they have created with their hatred and lack of empathy.
I don’t think it is intentional. Sociopaths are unable to simulate another emotional state in their mind, thus they have problems predicting emotions, even their own future emotional state. All they can do is to project their own emotions onto others.
I always kind of liked the take that empathy is self serving. You’re kind and compassionate to others because it makes you feel good to do so. People without empathy are just less of a person for the lack of it.
I don’t understand the perspective you’re coming-from.
True empathy is where one totally-understands another’s experience/perspective, & one “is one with” their condition/experiencing.
It isn’t that it makes you feel good to do that, or even to be able to do that: it’s just wired in, an innate-muscle of mind ( the mirror-neuron system, which seems to be broken in psychopaths ).
Why would being pierced by another’s grieving make one feel good to be doing?
Honest empathy isn’t self-serving.
It is overwhelming.
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Empathy is absolutely not inherent. It is a learned skill and not even most people have it. But either way it should be obvious how being able to better relate to those you socialize with would be beneficial to you.
Empathy is dependent-on mirror-neuron-system: without that working, you’re a psychopath, from what I can see.
The more mirror-neuron-function, the greater the pressure to be in empathy.
Claiming that it’s a learned-skill to me seems backwards:
sociopathy’s a learned-skill, culturally.
Empathy’s the natural-default.
Show me a chimp-mom not having empathy for her baby/toddler…
It’s non-empathy which has to be enforced, at the whole-population scale, to change/imprint/configure that population.
The people who after being in the Soviet Union said things like “we weren’t sociopathic, before”, back this.
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Empathy is dependent-on mirror-neuron-system
Source for that?
sociopathy’s a learned-skill
Source for that? Buddy sociopathy is an anti-social dysfunction because we are evolutionarily social animals. Sociopathy is counter to that evolutionary paradigm hence dysfunction, not standard operating procedure.
On the other hand we’re incredibly tribalistic, from anthropology and sociology we learn the average person only really has the capacity to personally care for about a hundred people, and we generally automatically empathize to some degree with that specific in-group. But we do not automatically empathize with those not in our in-group. If we did, we wouldn’t be tribalistic to the degree that we are and issues like caste systems or racial discrimination wouldn’t be the incredibly prominent issues they still are today.
Genuine empathy, the ability to conceptualize and more or less “feel” the emotions from the contextual lived experiences of others, is absolutely a learned trait. I think you’re confusing empathy with sympathy which is very different. Anyone can feel sympathetic, but if all humans were inherently empathetic then war wouldn’t exist. It couldn’t by virtue of everyone being able to experience empathetically the utter horror of war.
This is what happens when you build a system that rewards narcissism and psychopathy.
Remember when all the right wing “Christians” were spouting about the “sin of empathy?”
Seriously?
When?
That should be on banners, identifying them as being the enemies of their Christian Holy Spirit.
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God it was 6-8 months ago I think? Some MAGA pastor ass hat wrote a book about it saying empathy was a sin because it led people to not hate gay people basically and all the the fuck nuggets picked it up
I think it is more the other way around. The world is a scary place if you cannot predict other peoples or your own emotional state.
Another saying is something like evil is when you stop seeing other people as people and instead see them as things.
Yes it’s a discworld quote
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’ ‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’ ‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe JugulumThat’s exactly what I was thinking of! Of course it’s Sir Terry.
Individuals must always be treated as ends, never as means. Animals are individuals, too.
There should be mandatory psychological testing, and everyone without empathy can be removed from civil society. Let them live together in a faraway land. Antarctica, maybe.
Deport the people you don’t like? What’s wrong with therapy for damaged people?
It was more a commentary on the use of one idea being used to castigate a huge group of people (those without empathy), which could be applied to … ‘illegal immigrants’, and the atrocious things that’s led to via ICE (victims being both immigrants, and citizens).
Guess I should’ve used the /s
That being said, fuck nazis. Ship them all to Mercury.
from my experience most people’s empathy is, at best, selective. what do you call that? selective evil?
You call it evil. Most people do evil.
Being low empathy is a cause of problems, and probably often a prerequisite to doing really terrible things, but I don’t think everyone like that is evil. You can still decide to do the right thing even if you aren’t capable of imagining how others feel.
That is true, but where’s the motivation?
IF one’s missing empathy, no mirror-neuron-function, so others are just meat-marionettes to one…
why care whether they’re butchered or not?
They aren’t real if one hasn’t got mirror-neuron-function: they aren’t SOMEONES, they are meat-marionettes, then.
I think it’s the most-fundamental “valid/nonvalid” & “my-kind/others” polarization possible in human-category life…
I’ve read that there are true-psychopaths who simply abstain from harming those around them, even if they can’t understand why anybody would deem these others to be valuable, & I have to admire their character.
That’d take work, for no-reward.
it’s like the people who can’t experience pain: they usually get dead, early, as a consequence of it.
People without any empathy, whatsoever, how could they avoid massively-butchering others’ worth, if it isn’t even felt by their sentience, to be real?
Thank you for putting it in this discussion that psychopaths aren’t inherently-evil: they’re deafblind to empathy, totally, but that character is still significant.
That is what I’d read, & needed reminding of it.
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I recommend the Netflix show “The End of the F…ing World” which is largely about this.
What I think it comes down to is that you can develop an understanding of things that are not intuitive to you, or only intuitive sometimes in narrow circumstances, and the value of human solidarity and cooperation is true on a deep enough level that there are lots of different ways to discover it. As someone who doesn’t always have the emotional reactions that people expect or would be reassured by, it bugs me when people push the idea that having the wrong feelings is what makes someone a monster, both because there’s way more to it than that and because projected expectations have a powerful influence. People who are angry and numb and looking for a sense of identity shouldn’t be villified for the things about themselves they don’t get to choose.
I’m sure that you’ll appreciate this “gem”, then…
some “expert” is trying to get THE test for sentience be … seeing-visual-illusions.
Un-FUCKING-believable.
NO blind-since-birth human COULD EVER pass that test.
& this idiot’s an “expert”??
Contextual-awareness is exactly what you’re showing is needed.
I hope more people like you are helping prevent wrong-laws in our future.
I’ll do what I can to make that easier, once I’ve broken my health-problems.
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Please note that it is not only humans that person must exercise empathy for to avoid being evil. Most people suspend their empathy several times a day and don’t even notice. And that is a fucking evil thing to do. Any time you have to turn off your empathy to do something, you’re being a fucking monster.
Same psychologist talking about Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz:
In all of the discussions, Höss is quite matter-of-fact and apathetic, shows some belated interest in the enormity of his crime, but gives the impression that it never would have occurred to him if somebody hadn’t asked him. There is too much apathy to leave any suggestion of remorse and even the prospect of hanging does not unduly stress him. One gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal, but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.
you can have low empathy and still decide to not be a horrible person, by using your sympathy instead
inversely, you can be an empathetic person and convince yourself that the people you are oppressing are not human and therefore feel no empathy or sympathy towards them, in fact that’s literally what bigotry is why it exists
