Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
I had been thinking about writing about empathy for a while, because I see it as a key in moving from our current system to a post-growth world that values human well-being over economic growth. Empathy leads us to understand that it is through solidarity that we can pull together and form a better world.
And then I see a headline that Elon Musk said: “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.”
My first reaction is: “Elon, if you don’t have anything intelligent to say, don’t say anything.”
My second reaction was to see what was really said, because Elon Musk saying something inflammatory is great internet clickbait. So, I thought maybe the headline writer wasn’t being fair to Elon.
The truth is somewhere in between. I’ll give you the buildup to the empathy line to show you the full context of Musk’s quote in his interview with Joe Rogan.
Musk: There's a guy who posts on X who's great, Gad Saad?
Rogan: Yeah, he's a friend of mine. He's been on the podcast a bunch of times.
Musk: Yeah, he's 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.
Rogan: Right, understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.
Musk: Yes, like, it's weaponized empathy is the issue.
My Elon translation.
Elon thinks helping people is good. But he thinks empathy is being weaponized, and that you need to have empathy for civilization as well.
No. That is not a thing.
Empathy for civilization? Empathy is quite simply being sensitive to the experiences, thoughts and feelings of another PERSON. You cannot have empathy for a mailbox, or a Tesla car. You can have empathy for the person who bought that Tesla because they wanted to buy an electric car 5 years ago and now realize that their neighbors see them as a Nazi sympathizer. That person may deserve your empathy. The car is an inanimate object and does not.
There is scientific debate whether other animals can feel empathy. This is a fascinating philosophical discussion. Anyone who has had a dog comfort them when they are sad will probably say, “hell yes, animals can show empathy.” For the sake of this argument, let’s say animals can be empathetic.
So I think it is safe to say you can only have empathy for an animal, human or otherwise, that can have empathy for you.
A civilization is not something that can have empathy for you. It is not a sentient being. Empathy is only possible if there is the possibility of a two way street. If you are concerned about civilization, say that. You cannot empathize with it.
What I think he meant.
You can think that certain actions or government policies made by humans could be detrimental to civilization, and even risk civilization. No problem. I agree.
But that is not empathy. That is thinking that the actions of individuals collectively or policies of nations can be detrimental to a civilization.
If no one has picked up on what Elon is trying to say, it is that empathy is essentially “being woke”. But empathy is coded as simply caring about others and coded in our society as a very good thing. Being woke is essentially the same thing - but coded as a bad thing by Republicans.
There is a reason that Republicans are using the word woke instead of empathy. People like empathy, and if you declared war on empathy, you would lose. If you declare war on “woke”, which is a relatively new word, you can define it any way you want and drive the conversation to some extent.
Think about Republican messaging over the past few years. When a Republican says “we are going to get this woke agenda out of our schools,” or “the woke mind virus needs to be stopped,” some people agree. Now just replace “woke” for empathy and see how appealing that slogan is: “we are going to get this empathy agenda out of our schools,” or “the empathy mind virus needs to be stopped.” Most people wouldn’t be down with that.
What I think Elon is trying to get to is that things are getting too woke in his opinion and that will destroy civilization. I don’t think he has the emotional intelligence to realize that what he is saying is that caring about other people too much can ruin civilization. I guess that it is possible to care too much about everyone else to the point that civilization breaks down, but could everyone out there who thinks we are close to that theorized empathy hellscape please raise their hands?
I see no hands raised.
Yes, people who are “woke” can be annoying if their empathy is more performative than genuine, but that is not destroying Western civilization. Just don’t be friends with those people. Problem solved.
Don’t destroy the world’s oldest democracy because you have a trans daughter. Maybe try empathy on that one. Just a suggestion from one father to another. It tends to work better than destroying a country.
Empathy is a feature, not a bug. And it’s a damn good one.
It was empathy that led us to stop being hunters and gathers and start making a civilization in the first place. We learned that cooperation could make our lives better, and easier.
A lack of empathy that destroys us, quite literally. Most wide scale human atrocities such as genocides and wars attempt to dehumanize and “other” the person we are supposed to hate. When we don’t care about our fellow man or fellow woman, it is easier to see them as something that needs to be destroyed. Elon and the other oligarchs know that empathy is their enemy. If we have empathy for others and that leads to solidarity we are more likely to resist their greed and power grabs. Elon is intelligent enough to know that. Intelligence and emotional intelligence are two very different things.
I also think Elon may not be the greatest strategist (see the past two months for evidence) and doesn’t realize that bad mouthing empathy, which is the foundation for, you know … Christianity, might not play well in Peoria. Even in an America where religious observance is in decline, still about 62% of Americans are Christian. I went to Catholic School as a kid, so I am familiar with my bible thank you very much. Not so much the Old Testament, but the New Testament of the Bible is basically a manifesto for empathy. Good luck telling that crowd that empathy is a destructive force.
Empathy isn’t a bug. It is a feature of our software, and it might just be the best damn feature there is. Empathy is what makes us laugh, cry, and feel. It is what makes us distinctly human. It is the feature of our human condition that draws us to the best in art, culture, literature, religion and any human enterprise where we aspire to become part of something larger than just ourselves.
It is what you hope your children have more of than you so that they can be a better person than you.
As far as we know, there is only one place in the whole universe where empathy exists. To destroy that so that one strange man who cannot feel empathy can have more stuff could mark the end of civilization.
The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is a lack of empathy. We need more.
What startles me is how often this word salad of an interview gets analysed when it's probably not a summary of his mindset. Pure rambling chat. There is a worrying lack of argument in Musk's speech, it lacks reasoning and simply pronounces rather than discusses and persuades. This means to me that he's here simply to do something - he sees himself not as someone who leads the movement but more like Ayn Rand's messianic oligarchs of Atlas Shrugged - to quote from the book: he says: Get Out Of My Way. The problem is that Rand got it wrong and her worship of oligarchs as Supermen (and now Batmen) might have represented a top late 20th Century businessman (as she imagined Alan Greenspan to have been) but her work simply fails to describe the sons and daughters of such giants who now find themselves behind the levers of machines no human ever controlled before and no human understands how best to use.
Empathy cannot be destroyed. It is inherent to the human condition. Just like compassion and love. No matter how much they try to destroy and subdue it, it will always pop up. It will prevail.
Like climate change might derail us, diminish our numbers, make life very difficult for us, we will still prevail, because if nothing else, humans as a race are survivors.