I feel like someone told Elon that he’s autistic and lacks empathy, and his reaction was to get all defensive about it and start claiming people who lack empathy are actually superior.
Isn’t the whole “autistic people don’t have empathy” thing a long debunked myth anyway? It’s generally, among autistic people, seen as ablest to assume they are incapable of empathy, which would make Elon’s/Elon’s supporter’s excuses for him in this respect DOA.
Well my guess is he has narcissism but they told him it’s autism because it’s often a bad idea to tell a narcissist they have narcissism.
also, this south african apartheid nazi is not autistic, he’s just empathetically retarded.
When did the West have more empathy than other cultures? Elon’s mistake is not only the conclusion that empathy is a weakness but also the observation that the West is empathic.
This seems to be in the context of the other quote that only somebody with the ability for violence can be peaceful. If you are unable to stop destroying your opponent, are you going to win? Sounds like rage, which is not good to win wars.
Don’t treat Musk’s words as if they were coming from an intelligent source.
I believe the whole point of the post was to show contrast: here’s what some great minds said about empathy, and then there’s this guy.
I hope that empathetic people temporarily suspend their empathy when approaching musk
You know, “its a weakness” he says, don’t be weak when you have to eliminate a nazi
You can have empathy but still do what needs to be done
He does deserve empathy. That means he deserves a speedy trial, no torture, reasonable accommodations, a sentence that fits his crimes and is not primarily punitive, minimally restrictive confinement, a break every few hours from mandatory labor (building public transit, for example), and a non life sentence.
Rights are protected by a democracy, but fought for by a resistance. I hope you’re right about which one of those we’re at.
this is exactly what i came in here to say. it’s a sort of paradox, but only for those who can’t see the big picture. in order to save humanity, we have to become as ruthless as they are.
our children can learn to love after we’ve won the war.
The social contract grants governments and their leaders authority in exchange for protection and guaranteed rights for the citizens.
When those in power violate the contract, it no longer applies to them. Trump, Musk, and the rest of the fascists are no longer covered by the social contract. We do not have to tolerate them, respect them, or have empathy for them.
This is a realization that I’ve come to:
that humans survive (and thrive) when there is a genuine organization based in part on empathy. When a human tries to disrupt this organization for their own gain then it’s in the best interest of the group to ostracize and remove that human from the group.
From the APA’s “Journal of Experimental Psychology”:
“Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs” (2019)
(Abstract) or (Full Text PDF)
Further reading on this subject:
“How resource sharing resists scarcity: the role of cognitive empathy and its neurobiological mechanisms” (2022)
“Empathy moderates the relationship between cognitive load and prosocial behaviour” (2023)
“Cognitive load and moral decision-making in moral dilemmas under virtual reality: the role of empathy for pain” (2025)
(Abstract)
“The Influence of Cognitive Load on Empathy and Intention in Response to Infant Crying” (2016)
Wealth accumulation as a mental disorder makes so much goddamn sense.
There’s a growing body of research from behavioral neuroscience which indicate that wealth, power, and privilege have a deleterious effect on the brain. People with high-socioeconomic status often:
- Have reduced empathy and compassion.
- Have a diminished ability to see from someone else’s perspective.
- Have low impulse control.
- Have an extreme sense of entitlement.
- Have a hoarding disorder.
- Have a dangerously high tolerance for risk.
When you don’t need to cooperate with other people to survive, they become irrelevant to you. When you’re in charge, you can behave very badly and people will still be polite and respectful toward you. Instead of reciprocity, it’s a formalized double standard. When you have status, you’re given excessive credibility, and rarely hear the very ordinary push-back from others most of us are accustomed to, instead you receive flattery and praise and your ideas are taken seriously by default.
Humans have a strong need for egalitarianism; without it our brains malfunction and turn us into the worst versions of ourselves.
Some sources:
Hubris syndrome: An acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years
Does power corrupt? An fMRI study on the effect of power and social value orientation on inequity aversion.
Social Class and the Motivational Relevance of Other Human Beings: Evidence From Visual Attention
The Psychology of Entrenched Privilege: High Socioeconomic Status Individuals From Affluent Backgrounds Are Uniquely High in Entitlement
Hoarding Disorder: It’s More Than Just an Obsession - Implications for Financial Therapists and Planners
On the evolution of hoarding, risk-taking, and wealth distribution in nonhuman and human populations
Just a quick reply - haven’t read your sources yet. But I also feel like it works both ways, one’s lack of empathy helps you succeed in a capitalist culture that only has one metric for success, money. Will now start reading ;).
I was thinking about this recently and noticed something very interesting, as a thought experiment of sorts.
For extremely rich and wealthy people, it is not actually about the money.
I mean, it is about the money in the sense that money is the formal expression of something deeper. But there’s a shift, between having to think about money as a tool for survival, and having so much money that it’s no longer relevant day to day and it becomes a sort of score for a game of life.
Certainly in mid and high level of management, executives, etc. money is the most important thing, they are hired and their livelihood, as well as their score, depends on them making the line go up and accumulating more and more money for the owner class. But for the owner class, it’s all about the status, how the score is going. It’s essentially a global level dick measuring contest. Of course they are not going to use the money for anything, they don’t care. Their empathy is gone, what they want is to get ahead on the game. It’s all about the narrative, the optics, the projection of influence and power.
If it weren’t for money, it would be something else. Piety and ranks in theocracies, titles and land in the feudal times, honor and armies in feudal Japan, etc. It’s just so happens that modern globalist culture has settled on corporate financial wealth.
There’s a sort of mind bug that humans are susceptible to, that pushes people into the pursuit of this affluent status, then eliminates all humanity left from the brain. Just to see who dies with the most points.
I agree with the underlying concept, that having low/no empathy is rewarded under the current capitalist systems that most first world countries endorse.
The conflict I have with that mentality, which drives me, personally, away from it, is that if you go back in the history books, we only survived some eras because of strong communal bonds and collaboration with our tribe. In every circumstance, collaboration has been more beneficial economically, than any other option.
Therefore, I reject the selfish capitalist ideals and embrace empathy for the sake of humanity and my role in it.
I’ll note, I am neither rich, nor American.
We are still
thrivingcreating great things because we collaborate on a large level. It might not be that communal anymore (unfortunately), but working together is still the key to success (in a system way).It would be beneficial for all, if we could bring back the communal part - while still holding on to some of the benefits the modern global system has produced. I just always wonder, how do you replace or compete with the ice cold global capitalist systems, that can win most of the time in the short term and just overwhelm any sustainable, communal long term system.
That literally sounds like the local rich kid that was a bully but then got a DUI and killed someone but because his parents are rich didn’t even serve a day.
Aren’t those signs of sociopathy?
I think we need to forbid people who qualify as sociopaths from holding any office with any degree of power. They can’t be trusted with power.
Thank you! Needed this so badly!
Well, if you have empathy, you usually aren’t successful (at least in the last ~20 years).
Don’t buy into their propaganda. Succesful is not the same as being ultrarich. There are many parameters in which you can be succesful.
How about being able to afford food?
Aren’t successful according to capitalistic ideals. People with empathy are often successful by better measures
you aren’t rewarded by the oligarchs we give all our resources to, in return for the occasional table scrap, climate change, and the possible end of the species. which is what we’ve trained to see as ‘success’.
you can still be successful.
But die of starvation and a shitload of other things.
if you’re cool enough; theyll probably at least take a shot at killing you, sure. so just not pissing off the most violent thugs is success? doing tricks and getting rewarded with table scraps from the people who steal everything from everyone is success? being part of the engine of horror and misery that keeps anything from ever getting better is success?
I’m just trying to figure out what people mean when they say ‘success’ here.
Not being the underdog of everything, having a somewhat enjoyable life.
so, having the advantage? winning? enjoying yourself? so minions and treats?
not, like, building a sustainable future, or doing good for the people you love, or living by what you think is right, or forming deep and meaningful relationships?
Being at least as good as my parents. They ascended to the middle class, so I have to continue this trend or I will be considered a loser by my family.
Look how far we’ve come in health care. There are hot 95 year olds in my area. People live to 70/80/90/100. We’ve eradicated diseases and almost cured cancer until America abandoned science. Sorry about your family, thoughts and prayers and ribbons and crowdfunding.
A huge portion of the population is part of this. It’s not just nurses (who are hospitals) and doctors, but everyone from porters to trauma leads (if they aren’t fired by DOGE). From bystanders calling 911 to pharmacological researchers. Study participants to search and rescuers with wives in labour.
It’s our crowning achievement. Especially since we blew the information revolution by giving it to our bully lords.
Are there people involved in care with primarily selfish motivation? Of course. But we built this on empathy. It runs on empathy (and caffeine). Billions care for you because they have empathy.
It’s not our flaw. It’s our feature. It’s a deficiency to lack empathy. A deficiency of humanity.
I know it’s bad to dehumanize people, but sometimes I can’t help myself when we’re talking about a person who completely lacks empathy. It’s like they walk and talk exactly like a person does, but they’re missing something essential.
Perfectly said. My ex was a legit psychopath and they are not like us.
We were adopting a cat. On the form it says “reasons you would get rid of the cat” shit you not this dude starts writing biting, clawing, yelling like genuinely asnwering what he would do.
Had to stop him and say but not say “act like a human”.
The word psychopath comes from the Greek words psyche, meaning soul, and pathos, meaning suffering. So in Greek, psychopath means suffering soul.
What a shit name.
Fortunately, English speaking doctors invented a better name. Antisocial personality disorder.
It could be dispathos, “lacking soul”.
Damn that fits him even better.
Dude was assaulted multiple times by a professor causing him to drop out and forever associate his passion with SA.
Truly a tragic existence for a piece of garbage.
they do genuinely seem to have a pretty bad time, but the reactions to ‘bad’ are all different and very frequently not okay.
it turns out suffering is not a virtue, and only an excuse when it’s topical.
edit: I feel like, psychopaths tend to have some common stuff. it’s usually unpleasant. it sounds like a remarkably unpleasant way to be. I have had a few in my life, at various levels of opposition. You can’t really do anything about their suffering. if you have a dark enough sense of humor, you can have fun with them. I think that’s probably good. but it’s a developmental thing; I don’t think they can ‘get better’. you can’t fix it. you can just amuse them where they’re at.
that said: you should generally not put up with their bullshit if it’s not convenient. that is not helping. you are not mitigating anything by letting them exploit or abuse you.
if you’re in a position where you have some responsibility to help them, and they’re being assholes, you may have to decide whether to deal with it. some of the more impulsive ones may not be able to not be assholes, and it’s up to your tolerances whether you try to help them despite that. they probably deserve it; they’re still people in most of the ways that matter, but that doesn’t mean it has to come from you.
I vote we take away the power of the word psychopath by using it to refer to ALL mental illnesses and disorders. And if someone says psychopath when they mean ASPD, we tell them to speak English.
But psychopath has a very negative connotation, as it should.
No it shouldn’t, it’s a shit name. It means suffering soul. If we mean people with ASPD, let’s speak English.
It means that in Latin but we aren’t speaking Latin.
I’d only give up my dog over my dead body.
Tolerance of intolerance is contradictory.
There is no defense for intolerance.
Unless it’s intolerance of intolerance.
“Welcome to my house, here everybody is welcomed and respected, but if you choose to make somebody’s life difficult because they’re different from you your ass will be on the curb before you can raise your palm over your head.”
Empathy needs to be the definition of humanity, such that those who don’t feel it are classed as inhuman.
Dehumanization is always the first step to eradication.
Classing anyone as inhuman is dangerous. A widespread inability to see the most barbaric Nazis as regular human beings like ourselves is one of the reasons Nazism has been able to sneak back up on us. It’s important to recognize that the potential for empathy, and the potential for empathy to wither away, are both human potentials. As humans we have the capacity for great compassion or great cruelty. It won’t help us if we say, “Oh, that cruelty is not us. We’re humans; they’re not.”
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That is just a cartoonishly evil thing to say. That is why it is difficult to not dehumanize. It feels so unreal.
Uncanny valley
You aren’t arguably human if you have no empathy.
Human civilizations arose and grew because of human cooperation and organization
Not through the will of one man or a small group of people
You can claim kings, emperors, divine rulers, czars and god men who led entire groups of people … but it was masses of people cooperating with another that made it all possible.
We may be disillusioned, distracted, manipulated, controlled, coerced and taken advantage of … but it is still and will always be masses of people that make our world possible.
I love the African philosophy of ubuntu: ‘I am who I am, because of who we all are’
Buddhists would say that if you look closely, you find no distinction between yourself and everyone else. We are made of each other. Empathy and compassion are our nature because nothing happens to just me or just you. It’s one shared life, and we suffer when we fail to recognize this.
This is a really good perspective too!
Wait, is THAT the origin of the name of a specific variant of Linux?
It is indeed!
Neat!
Even those leaders are just avatars of the shared humanity they lead and represent, they persist only as a creation of a shared culture and by permission of those people whether or everyone involved is cognizant of the fact.
The masses create everything, even those leaders because nothing exists in a vacuum
Studies show again and again that people tend to attribute their wins to skill and ability even in a completely rigged game. Likewise, they tend to do the opposite when looking at their fellow man: “they got lucky, while I worked my ass off to get here”.
When wealth is regarded as a proof of skill and enterprising spirit, poverty must perforce be the opposite of that. And once you start regarding lack of wealth as a moral failing, true empathy dies on the vine.
Excellent summary. It’s not just Musk that doesn’t understand empathy — it’s ALL the tech bros.
Apparently a ton of the tech bros are part of cults in SF that practice rationalism. Some offshoots of rationalism attempt to “jailbreak” the mind into psychopathy. They quite literally teach that psychopathy is a net benefit for the individual and they strive to become psychopathic as a tool for success.
I remember talking to a coworker at a tech startup once. He was leaving to go work for some like military intelligence spy company. I was like, “But what if they have you work on something fucked up, like spying on innocent people, or sending drones to kill people?” He was like, big shrug, the pay is good.
Some people just don’t care about other people. He was nice to people he knew, when it didn’t really cost him anything.
Our society isn’t really set up to discourage that kind of worldview. That kind of selfish person typically thrives.
It’s all powerful people. Many studies show that social power affects the brain, suppressing empathy centers.
As you get more wealth, status or fame, your brain becomes less capable of empathy and closer to the brain of a psychopath.
As long as we have hierarchies, we will be ruled by villains.
It’s a lot of people
Empathy is the cornerstone of a successful society.
By helping people who needs it, society as a whole will grow stronger.
Lack of empathy only causes cracks to form and will sooner or later ruin any society built from it.
Musk has once again shown himself to be an utter idiot.
I think empathy is misunderstood. Especially this notion that having empathy is a proxy for being a good person.
Consider the sadist. You cannot enjoy someone’s suffering if you can’t recognize it. Being manipulative would also be difficult without a grasp of someone’s inner life. A confidence artist must be an empath. A “cold read” psychic must be uniquely empathetic.
In 1921 Hitler gave a speech where he promised to put Jewish people into camps to see “how they like it”. (he was upset about WWI German POWs and blamed Jewish people for their long internment). So Hitler did recognize Jewish people as human and capable of suffering; that was the point.
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings and emotions of another person.
This is what makes the sadist argument so interesting, if still a red herring. They do share the feelings, and it gets them off! The issue with this line of reasoning is that level of sadism is a mental health problem and not something people should strive for or encourage; so in the end it’s not much of an argument against empathy.
Also, I don’t know that I agree that Hitler “did recognize Jewish people as human and capable of suffering.” I don’t think he cared either way. Their suffering & extermination was politically useful for him. I think that’s a pretty good argument against any empathic feelings he may or may not have held.
There’s a big difference between academically knowing how a person feels–in a disconnected way–and actually being able to relate to that feeling as if you were experiencing it yourself.
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings and emotions of another person.
You’re right that it’s trivial to find examples of bad people who understand the emotions and feelings of others, but it’s a lot harder to be a bad person when you can share those emotions and feelings yourself.
Like being mean to an NPC in a video game
I know rationally they are just a bunch of pixels and code, but as soon as they have plausible human dialogue, and I say something mean, and they act hurt… something triggers in my brain and I feel that hurt. And I immediately want to stop
I literally struggle to be mean to a bunch of pixels, just because they mimick a living creature. It’s also interesting because often it promotes a sort of dissonance, “I know this isn’t real… and yet I cannot help but feel what they feel… Even though they feel nothing”
something triggers in my brain and I feel that hurt
Are you familiar with mirror neurons? We are social beings. We are built from the ground up to feel each others pain.
Yes indeed. Mirror neurons are directly related to empathy I believe
