Anti-Empathy: The Billionaire’s Last Resort

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

So says billionaire oligarch / tragically inept video game streamer Elon Musk, in his latest of many appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience. Look, I’m not going to spend too much energy dissecting this quote, teasing out its nuances and exploring the ways in which Musk sought to soften his stance even as he stated it outright. I’m not even going to explore the greater milieu of right-wing anti-empathy politics, an iceberg of which this quote is only the extreme tip. Plenty of leftist ink has been spilled in that pursuit already, by journalists and philosophers who’ve done a better job of it than I ever could. If you want to get up-to-speed on that particular facet of fascist groupthink, there’s a recent episode of Some More News that covers it in great detail.

Instead of picking it apart, I’d like to play it out. What is the billionaire’s vision for a world in which empathy no longer drives our actions? And, most importantly, what do they get out of it?

Empathy: a quick primer.

First, a definition of terms. “Empathy” is defined as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another” (thanks, Webster). Note the “and.” Empathy isn’t sympathy; it isn’t merely an awareness of other people’s thoughts and feelings, it’s the subconscious tendency to feel those feelings yourself. In terms of pure, antiseptic evolutionary utility (to put it in terms the Rationalist set might understand), empathy allows the human animal to experience a far broader slate of emotions and stimuli than its sensory organs might otherwise provide. It allows us to live a more textured life, colored not only by our own experiences, but by the experiences of those around us. To deny empathy is to shut off the human imagination at its source. With literally zero capacity for empathy, we lose the ability to form a theory-of-mind for those around us. We start to view them as unthinking automata, or “NPCs,” to crib a phrase from King Gamer himself.

The complete abdication of empathy is, of course, utterly impossible (for now — perhaps there’s some weird Neuralink side-project that’ll emerge to prove me wrong in the future, but I digress). We are human beings; we can’t help empathizing with each other, no matter how hard we may try to repress the reflex. I’d go so far as to say that empathy is what defines us as human in the first place. The ability to picture another human being’s experience, to run the simulation in your mind and feel the results in your flesh, is fundamental to the human experience.

But let’s say, through social programming or genetic engineering or the liberal application of broad-scale despair and suffering, the Musk-Andreessen-Thiels of the world get what they want. Let’s say we wake up one day to a world in which empathy is viewed as a weakness, rather than a strength. What happens next? What are the characteristics of life in a low-empathy society?

“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

I’m not exactly a Hobbesian — in fact, more and more, I find myself on the Murray Bookchin train, next stop anarcho-socialism. I believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity. All my recent experiences with chronic illness, with economic hardship, with natural disaster, have only buttressed that belief. But that famous Hobbes quote is the product of an era of comparative scarcity and cruelty, an era in which common empathy was suppressed by the overwhelming presence of primal fear. I didn’t live through the English Civil War, thank God. I hope I never have to live through a modern American analogue.

Back to the topic: the opposite of empathy, when you boil it right down, is self-interest.

Extreme self-interest means placing your own wants above the greater needs of society. We’ve seen this trend across the right-wing for decades now — the defunding of programs like SNAP and Head Start, the gradual erosion of the top tax brackets so that billionaires can hoard as much money as they damn well please, regardless of the vanishing utility of money past a certain threshold… Who cares if it doesn’t do them any good? Who cares if it could do infinitely more good in the hands of a well-regulated welfare program? Jeff Bezos wants another $500 million mega-yacht, so it doesn’t matter what the rest of us need. 

The model of low-empathy behavior, the billionaire, seeks to impose his way of life upon the rest of us. So what animates his way of life?

Well… profit, mostly.

In a low-empathy society, there is no greater good than profit. Every last citizen’s first priority should be to get one over on the next guy. If you’re not scamming your clients, bilking them for all they’re worth, then you’re not being a good parent to your children, a good partner to your spouse — assuming you care about any of that, after all, since caring about other people’s opinions of you would require you to be able to form an idea of what those opinions might be in the first place. Anyway, if you’re not willing to pull one over on your customers, you’ll quickly be bulldozed out of existence by competitors who are. With no regulations in place to hedge out predatory behavior, landlords become slumlords. Food and drug producers return to their gilded-age tactics of adulteration and outright poisoning. The industrial sector produces the absolute cheapest products it can get away with, all while shunting every negative externality onto the consumer — or onto the environment. The Cuyahoga burns once more.

This is utopia for the billionaire, whose wealth affords him unbridled power in a world where there are no social consequences for his self-interest. And that’s really what it boils down to; that’s the reason why billionaires want this world I’m describing. They lack empathy, either innately or as a learned behavior, and they’re tired of pretending otherwise. Tired of being judged, tired of being criticized by holier-than-thou activists and lefty politicians. They want all the power their wealth should entail, please, but hold the responsibility.

So what do we do about it?

Well, the good news is that the right-wing war on empathy has been about as successful as every other right-wing “war-on-a-concept” in recent history. Studies show that empathy, insofar as we can measure it in a lab, is actually on the rise among young people today. This shouldn’t be a surprise, really — think back on the War on Drugs, which I think we can all agree has resulted in a resounding victory for Drugs. Or the War on Terror, which has almost certainly created far more terrorists than it’s ever eliminated. For all their fire and fury, they’re not actually very good at this sort of thing.

The bad news: they’re going to hurt a lot of people en-route to their ultimate failure. Just as the War on Drugs resulted in a major increase in stop-and-frisk policing, anti-minority policies, and mass incarceration. Just as the War on Terror led us to utterly destroy several Middle Eastern countries wholesale, costing thousands of civilian lives, and eroding our rights to privacy at home. The War on Empathy is going to hurt. The people helming the effort want it to hurt, in fact — it’s been pushed to the point of cliche by now, but the cruelty really is the point. The more cruelty they can foist upon us, the more we might come to accept cruelty as a fact of life. And the more we accept cruelty, the more tempted we might become to start enacting cruelty on those around us. “If they’re doing it,” we think, “why can’t I?”

Don’t give in, though. Desperation is on its way — as we cut ourselves off from the greater system of global trade, economic devastation is a foregone conclusion. Already the ports lie empty. We’re going to suffer, at least to some degree, as a result of the policies the Republican party wish to impose upon us. And if we hold onto our empathy, we will hurt all the more, as the pain of our friends and neighbors piles atop our own.

The secret to alleviating that pain is not to shut yourself off from the world, to erase your empathy so that you can focus on rank survival. For one thing, it’s impossible. For another, even if it were possible, it would be akin to lobotomizing yourself. Empathy is a critical facet of human cognition — I’d go so far as to say it’s the trait most responsible for helping our species survive its earliest days on the savannah. Empathy formed the first tribes. Empathy set the first guardsmen. Empathy gave us medicine, not to heal ourselves, but to heal those we love. Learn from that.

When you feel the pain of another, work to help them through that pain. Turn your efforts outward, not in. None of us can make it through the coming era alone; we all are going to need support. And I’m not talking about moral support, although kind words are an important tool to show empathy. When the threats against us are material, we must act materially to head them off. Simple acts of charity will do. Build houses for Habitat, volunteer at your local food bank, go out and pick up trash around your neighborhood. Compliment a stranger on the street (just, y’know, don’t be creepy about it). Help your friends with their personal problems. Engage with the world. Be conspicuously good. You don’t have to do much, but you do have to do something, anything, to show that you care. When cruelty is government policy, kindness is rebellion.

A single act of kindness can change a life.

A million acts of kindness can change a nation.