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.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” –Elon Musk
I have previously characterised conservatism as primarily a lack of empathy. This quote does not bode well for America.
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.”
What were the words of Elmo musk again? That there is too much empathy in the world? Fo figure
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 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.
But if I’m right and they’re wrong then it’s ok.
/S
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.
a lot of people who attained to positions of power despite being laughably unqualified did so by being ruthless, entirely self-serving, and devoid of any kind of ethical principles. can’t get any of that with empathy weighing you down
Its unfortunate that we (or our ancestors) have structured society and institutions in a way that rewards those traits. Makes one wonder when we would need to consider a restructuring of sorts.
That was on purpose. Most revolutions (including the American revolution) have been coopted by elites who desire to have control over people.
Gee, this Musk fellow seems more and more like a Nazi, eh?
I mean, it’s not like he did multiple Nazi salutes publicly, on-stage to celebrate the election of a fascist, racist president…
reads news
Whaaaaaaaat!?
Worse, a Nazi on Ketamine, Mushrooms, Ecstacy and Adderall. Even Hitler was only on Meth and some type of barbiturate to help him sleep.
Hitler was on SOOOO much more than that.
In this list, only Adderall might have negative effects on empathy. Ketamine is neutral. And Shrooms and MDMA would even increase empathy.
There are edge cases ofcourse but the drugs themselves don’t mean much in terms of a change in empathy.
The drug that has the most negative impact on empathy is money, and that is his primary addiction.
Now that is a fact.
While I’m perfectly ok with saying Musk is a Nazi, I think I’ll draw a line here. I don’t think Musk is worse than Hitler was. I know, I’m a radical thinker.
But who knows – Musk still has some time in the race. But it does seem like his political contributions have come to an end.
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.
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…
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.
You need to source that
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),
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
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 take this line if thought to the extreme, I see the same will to live in peace in a carrot.
I do understand OP. But the wording can be taken to many extremes.
Another extreme would be that if someone loses the will to live, it is fair game.
Guess that makes me vegan friendly meat.
Then you should go see a doctor. Plants don’t have “a will”. You need sentience and a subjective experience of existence for that.
We used to think that most animals lacked those things as well.
Plants very well may have some kind of consciousness or will, it’s just one that is so different from our own as to be unrecognizable with our current understanding.
Personally, I acknowledge that predation is a part of the ecosystem, and that it is not morally wrong to be a predator (Nobody thinks that falcons or bobcats are immoral for existing in the ecosystem the way that they do. I don’t think that should be different for humans). I do believe it is morally wrong to treat an animal poorly in advance of its demise though, so my policy on food is that I will eat animals and animal products if I believe that the animal that provided said food lived/is living a life that is as good as or better than it’s wild relatives, provided the practice is environmentally sustainable. So I eat a mostly vegan diet, but I also sometimes eat eggs from people’s well treated pet poultry or pasture raised chickens, and I eat seafood that the monterey bay aquarium says is sustainable. On rare occasions I will eat pasture raised poultry or hunted meat. I don’t do any dairy or farmed red meat because of the greenhouse gasses associated with their production.
I think it’s important for us to hunt deer in most of north america because we eliminated their primary natural predator from the ecosystem and they overpopulate to the point of being harmful to the environment without wolves in their ecosystem.
Yeah, domestication was reciprocal. You see a creature into the world, care and provide for it and, eventually, see it out of the world.
You can frame it in spiritual terms, or as a symbiotic relationship that evolved over time. But however you put it, factory farming is a violation of that pact.
Plants don’t have “a will”.
Says you. They certainly have a will to reproduce, get sunlight, get water.
You need sentience and a subjective experience of existence for that.
Ok. So anything that doesn’t have a subjective experience of existence is morally fine to eat.
Under your rules we can morally eat people in comas.
Under your rules we can morally eat people in comas.
Ah, I agree! If fruits and vegetables deserve moral consideration because they “want to live,” then coma patients, clearly not demonstrating any ambition, are demonstrably and ethically fair game. I mean, they’re just lying there, right? No subjective experiences, taking up valuable hospital space and depleting emotional energy while not contributing anything… a head of cabbage with a Medicare plan.
Waste not, want not.
I will not debate plant sentience. If you erroneously believe in and care about plant sentience, you should go vegan, by eating them directly far fewer plants are murdered.
Ok. So anything that doesn’t have a subjective experience of existence is morally fine to eat.
Nope. Didn’t say that either. You were the one hallucinating a carrots will.
If people bring up vegetarianism in an empathy debate then no-one can stop me empathising with the carrot.
Yes, but the point about minimizing plant deaths by eating plants instead of feeding more plants to animals and then eating the animals is a valid one…
Yes. Gping further. If you really want to minimise plant deaths then you remove all animals (including humans).
My main point is that empathy and it’s focus depends very much on the individual. Empathy is a strong emotional argument but a weak logical one.
Empathy is what you feel; not what the object of your empathy feels
Where did I claim that this is not the case?
Nowhere, not necessarily. But you did invalidate another person’s feelings of empathy by telling them to “go to the doctor” for it, which is pretty shitty behavior
Please read again.
Let’s not pretend that person really cares for carrots or has empathy for them. And if you feel that inanimate objects do have a will, then you should see a doctor, as I imagine that is highly debilitating. Not an insult, but sad that genuine advice is seen that way.
You should try having some empathy.
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.
