Comment by timoth3y
1 day ago
“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve 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 man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
― G. M. Gilbert, American psychologist who worked on the Nuremberg trials
Didn't someone recently mention that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy"?
Sounds familiar...
I didn’t know who that was, so googled. Apparently, Musk said that.
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1 reply →
That quote was massively taken out of context. His argument was that the west has too much empathy, not that empathy is bad, period. He even specifically prefaced that with saying that empathy is a good thing.
Context:
Musk: Yeah, [Gad Saad is] awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. 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, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also don't let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: 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.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/yes-musk-said-the-...
23 replies →
The problem with being on the public stage, is that Every. Single. Word. They. Utter. has the ability to be reframed. With Deepfakes, they can now have words put in their mouths, in a realistic manner.
That's why so many politicians and C-suite execs are "weasely." They learn to choose their words carefully. The Fed Chair can crash the markets, by wincing at the wrong time.
I empathize with him (see what I did, there?), but he's in a position where his utterances can either do great good, or great harm.
Many of these mega-rich folks keep their mouths shut, and that's for a reason.
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It's crazy we got all those lessons figured out, clear as can be and right in the history books, that every kid is supposed to learn. And yet, here we are, back to square one.
As if most college students (never mind kids) know anything about history worth a dime? They couldn't tell you who did what to whom in WWII, never mind getting into any nuance. At best the majority misremembers some stuff they "learned" from movies.
He said that because he couldn't empathize with those defendants...
This is the paradox of tolerance and it’s pretty cringe.