She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.
…she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, and evil, as well as politics,…
Her name appears in the names of journals, schools, scholarly prizes, humanitarian prizes, think-tanks, and streets; appears on stamps and monuments; and is attached to other cultural and institutional markers that commemorate her thought. In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism.
She was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937…
Lacking empathy is the last thing people should want from their leaders.
This is what is meant by “socialism or barbarism”
the fundamental weakness is spoiled rich brats like yourself with entitlement issues.
Removed by mod
Please do.
[…] But what came next in the conversation may shine more of a light on what motivates Musk to cut down the size of government, and it melds with his takeover, purchase and founding of companies in the private sector. It’s the belief that empathy for individuals is costly to the collective.
Musk pointed to California’s move to provide medical insurance even to undocumented people who qualify for its low-income Medi-Cal program.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said, borrowing the term from Gad Saad, a Canadian scholar who is also a frequent Rogan host.
While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Empathy, he said, has been “weaponized.”
It’s an important thing to remember as Musk turns his crusade toward the US government. While President Donald Trump has said cuts will not touch safety net programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, except to root out fraud, Musk made clear during the interview that he believes that the concept of Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.”
Musk’s lack of empathy is a theme in the recent biography for which the writer Walter Isaacson was given access to the billionaire throughout his takeover of Twitter.
And Musk’s disregard for individuals employed at his companies is also a throughline in the book, including on production lines at Tesla and at SpaceX, where he is described as quick to fire people.
At each of those companies, Musk expressed a desire to save humanity: with electric cars in the case of Tesla; by making humanity interplanetary in the case of SpaceX; and by sticking up for the First Amendment in the case of Twitter.
“He likes this notion of helping humanity,” Isaacson told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2023. “In fact, he has more empathy for humanity in general than he often has for the 20 people around him.
Musk still has that view of himself as a superhero taking risks; he repeatedly told Rogan about his fear of being killed. Now, instead of saving humanity, he believes he is saving the US government by cutting billions of dollars in spending, even if it impacts many Americans’ daily lives — by costing them their jobs or by curtailing government services — in the process.
From the CNN article “Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy”
It’s the belief that empathy for individuals is costly to the collective.
Or as the Nazis put it:
“Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles” (you are nothing, your people is everything)
and in public health, almost the opposite has been proven for like a century+
No part of fascist ideology has any basis in reality.
it aspires to solipsism, and material reality is the enemy, but also, they do tend to onboard with something at least tangentially related to real grievances like ‘you haven’t kept up with the world and don’t really understand the way a lot of people understand themselves and each other these days’ or ‘there is a plague and that is scary’, it’s just that the next and every subsequent step is something like ‘be one with the plague, become the fear #darkknight#batman’ and/or ‘and your daughter likes kissing other girls because the jewish space laser made her gay, so we must #exterminatethejews’.
fun fact about the ‘jewish’ space laser: the only attempt anyone ever made to build a world dominating (network of) space laser(s) was their guy back in the 80s. i’d bet money some part of the idea was a leftover from werner von braun.
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.
Captain G.M. Gilbert
The army psychologist assigned to interview the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.
Thank you for posting this. I first saw this quote decades ago and it has been on my mind more the last few years. Through Trump 1.0, COVID, Trump 2.0 and the return of Nazis, it’s a caution not to lose our connection to each other no matter how they try to divide us and pit us against each other.
I think there’s multiple different types of “evil”. What you’re referring to is “sociopathy”: An utter disregard for human life.
Gilbert himself didn’t seem sure he had a complete definition, just a critical piece of it. As a psychologist he would have understood sociopathy well, among other psychological maladies. He seems to be making a distinction here, but that is my reading of him. If he could have provided a diagnosis that underpinned becoming a Nazi it would have been a bombshell, but they all seemed rather normal under a battery of tests. Instead of a specific diagnosis, the Banality of Evil became the commonly cited mechanism behind the Nazi’s abhorrent acts. Weak men following vile leaders.
After thinking about Gilbert’s quote I have come to conclude a lack of empathy is a necessary, if not sufficient condition for evil. There may be more to it, but this piece is already enough to oppose evil, and challenging on its own.
You know what kind of people lack empathy? Psychopaths. Narcissists. You know, assholes.
And republicans
But you repeat yourself…
Cluster B Personality Disorders is just medicalized terminology for “evil assholes.”
Too broad of a brush stroke. BPD isn’t as toxic as NPD or ASPD. Even within NPD there are variations of toxicity. Cluster B’s nickname is the “dramatic and erratic” cluster, and some of what falls within there is much more about trauma fallout than evil megalomania.
As someone who was the target of BPD rage for years, I say, from experience, that BPD can be every bit as dangerous and potentially life-destroying as NPD or ASPD.
I stand by what I said.
BPD isn’t as toxic as NPD or ASPD.
Maybe not as toxic, but as someone who fell for and dated a girl with BPD (who wasn’t diagnosed until years after we broke up), I can tell you from experience: it’s brutal.
To clarify for anyone reading who doesn’t know the acronym, BPD is Borderline Personality Disorder, not Bipolar Disorder.
Or, to be more charitable, a scientific attempt to understand what it is that makes someone become a clinical asshole, in hopes of “curing” assholes.
A noble, if futile effort.
Nazis
B-B-But AuTiStIc !!!
You jest, but that’s actually an important point for understanding. What narcissists and autists share in common is difficulty taking social perspective. They struggle to or are unable to see what something looks like from the other participant’s perspective. The reasons why they have this difficulty are different though. Narcissists don’t regard others as equals and instead see them as resources to use or discard. Its a problem of delayed social-emotional maturation. Autists have pragmatic communication differences possibly due to neurological differences. They lack the hardware and software needed to do effortless empathic reading of others. However, they are often perfectly willing to learn how to do empathy as a foreign language (cognitive empathy) when they get to the point where they appreciate their difficulties and see the utility in learning how to compensate.
That is liteally something that you would read in a children story and go “damn the villain is a little one dimensional aren’t they”.
Always been told that one-dimensional characters are boring and unrealistic
…and yet here we are
God, I wish this shit were boring
It’s something a Sith would say to his apprentice
lol wut? Empathy is the literal definition of what makes up civilization. People breaking their legs and others taking care instead of feeding the wolves.
‘Sorry granny president musk told us to yeet you in the swamp’
What a dipshit
Fuck Musk, but your comment is making a major factual error.
Empathy being the result of civilisation is a common faultline. Which follows the sort of civilisational narrative popularised by the romans of barbarism vs civilisation to justify their imperialist conquests, and then officialised by philosophers like Hobbes with his writings on the “State of Nature”, further pushed in europe and asia to justify things like colonialism and characterise it as a selfless act of bringing civilisation to people.
But modern knowledge shows this a very faulty way of thinking. Empathy existed much before “civilisation”. Nomadic and Gatherer-Hunter Tribes were often more egalitarian are more “caring” than early state based societies. The archeological record is full of evidence for this.
In fact, if you asked an anthropologist, I bet they would make the argument that early states, which led to the first records of things like slavery and domination, was a step back in empathy.
No empathy for Elon Musk
Musk said that? Wtf? =.=
At first i didn’t believe it when my coworker told me “lots of businesses have a natural lifetime of 20 years. After that, they enshittify.” I thought he was making it up.
Now, however, i believe it. Seeing how Google has started massively enshittifying its products around 2020, roughly 20 years after its inception, after providing good service for sth like 20 years (think 2012 Youtube), and Musk starting to be a rampant asshole, after having put out tweets such as this one:
as recently as in 2018.
How can someone still trust anything coming out of his mouth…
Typical seller, just say what you think people want to hear, no matter the truth…
Had to look it up, but apparently yes.
So that means not only is he a threat to our species, he’s unaware that he’s a threat to our species?
He thinks he’s the good guy
He thinks he’s the good guy
wow. He never grew beyond 12 yrs old it seems. This is the same type of thinking that leads you to say that we should cull our elderly and disabled because they’re a drain on society. Or forceful eugenics. No wonder he’s also obsessed with the birth rate.
Is there a name for this? Narcissistic Hero syndrome?
hes trying to act pseudo-intellectual, much like J peterson and shapiro.
Psychopathy, or psychopathic personality,[1] is a personality construct[2][3] characterized by impaired empathy and remorse, in combination with traits of boldness, disinhibition, and egocentrism. These traits are often masked by superficial charm and immunity to stress,[4] which create an outward appearance of apparent normalcy.[5][6][7][8][9]
yeah he’s a piece of shit. Fuck Musk.
It’s definitely more nuanced than the out of context quote sounds, but not by much. He stated that he believes human empathy is being exploited so that people act against their own interests, which he believes will lead to a societal collapse.
He is a shitstain who is justifying hatred behind pretty standard white-supremicist talking points (the illegals are destroying our country, and we’re letting them do it because we’ve been taught to care about others!), but the argument is nuanced enough that we should consider it’s context. Let’s not sink to their level of engaging with headlines taken out of context. Let’s be angry about the problems with what he actually said, as opposed to the grossly simplified headline.
the “context” of the quote sounds like a bunch of doublespeak bullshit, attempting to dress up the core message as a “nuanced” not-so-reprehensible mindset.
excuse me, but fuck that shit. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” is plenty enough to judge by, without wasting time analyzing “context”
based reply.
No, it’s not nuanced.
The context is what you said, that he thinks empathy is being used to allow too many brown people in the country. Why are you trying to act like there’s a deeper meaning or nuance?
It’s also patently dumb. The US built a huge portion of it’s empire and hegemony using empathy. USAID is the perfect example of it. By spending relatively small amount of money on humanitarian aid in poorer nations we secured land, treaties, and support that locked us into power and other nations out.
Empathy is a powerful weapon for a world power to have and use.
What’s dumb is throwing out empathy and instead saying “Actually, fuck every other nation, we will take care of ourselves”. That is what will lead to the collapse of “western civilization”. What’s dumb is eliminating empathy in terms of social services all in order to enrich a small powerful lordship. That collapses western civilization.
The lie that is being perpetuated is that the US is in danger of going bankrupt any minute now because of empathy. There is a huge mountain of wealth waiting to be tapped that isn’t because of bad economics policies of the 80s.
Empathy brings stability, prosperity, and wealth. Ditching empathy is the fast path to destroying a civilization.
i agree we have talk about why this is absurd to reach the people falling for this shit, but i don’t agree this is more nuanced. the article is correctly summarizing what he’s saying. and what he’s saying is horrific. first go around with trump, i was struck by that everyone treated him as a joke, when looking directly at his rallies i realized he was even worse. his messaging was exactly as dangerous as the media was saying, but he sounded exactly like the kind of politician his foolish base always votes for. this go around was even more concerning. his foolish base was no longer listening to what he had to say while the rest of us tuned him out. this time they tuned him out while the rest of us focused up. it’s hard to explain, but his propaganda campaigns have been extremely precise. meanwhile the democrats have given nothing but performative activism. it’s bleak times
Who hurt you, Elon?
nobody ever, and that’s the problem. could still be fixed, but an ounce of prevention is worth a megaton of cure.
I think lack of empathy is also a symptom of autism…
I don’t think so. It may appear to others as a lack of empathy, but I imagine it’s usually just social miscues or whatever.
Musk’s lack of empathy comes from one of his personality disorders, not autism. He is clearly, at the very least, a narcissist. He is probably also a sociopath.
I don’t think that’s right. You might be thinking of sociopathy or borderline? Me and all my auties feel empathy.
iirc we are empathetic but we have a hard time figuring out what we’re feeling.
And how to behave having such feelings
Ahh yes. Perhaps.
She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.
I am going on tangent and say that her seminal and widely praised book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil” is one of the most boring books I have ever read. I was expecting a more philosophical discussion and more focused about Eichmann, but it turned out to be more like an objective journalism, or even a bureaucratic administrative report that would make you sleep. So many jargons and names it is hard to keep up. The little bureaucratic details unfortunately bores me. I had to skip to the end where it finally talked about banality of evil. I appreciate that the book gave insight into the logistics and intricacies of the Holocaust, but sorry if I want to read a history book, I would buy one. I was expecting a more abstract and philosophical discussion about the nature of evil.
I like the book a lot but I think you make a fair point. It was originally written as a work of journalism, a series of articles for the New Yorker.
Great scholar for social dynamics and (philosophical) political science groundwork stuff.
