<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/08/empathy-sin-christian-right-musk-trump>
"Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the
billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “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 idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but
it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American
right. Musk learned about “suicidal empathy” through his “public bromance” with
Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of
evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable
social media following. By Saad’s accounting – and this is not dissimilar from
the white nationalist “great replacement theory” – western societies are
bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer,
browner and more Muslim countries.
“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued
to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s
catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting
a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among
white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom have begun to recast the
pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump and his
agenda as a “sin” or “toxin”. The debate has emerged among Catholics too, with
JD Vance recently using the medieval Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” to
justify the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and foreign aid.
(Vance’s stance – that it’s righteous to privilege the needs of one’s family,
community and nation over those of the rest of the world – earned a rebuke from
the pope, but support from other influential Catholic thinkers.)
It’s not every day that evolutionary psychologists and evangelical creationists
end up on the same side of an issue, but it’s also not every day that empathy
is treated as anything other than a broadly positive feature of human
experience – your standard, golden rule-type stuff."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
