Optimus Prime
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Decided this should be its own thread
Good (and long) read on the rights war on empathy and how it’s necessary to reconcile their support, love and slavish devotion to Trump
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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……..
How we relate to the pain of others is a question that always lurks beneath our politics, but it’s one that is particularly relevant now.
In its first months, the Trump administration has begun to implement a radical rightwing regime featuring mass deportations without due process, draconian cuts to domestic and foreign aid programs, and venally self-interested foreign policy – a set of policies that amount to a prescription for mass suffering and death.
Whether Trump succeeds or fails in his quest to remake US society is very much a question of how much of the pain of others Americans are willing to abide in the pursuit of making America great again.
The rightwing movement against empathy seeks to dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society – our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering. We should see the campaign against empathy by Trump supporters for what it is: a flashing red light warning of fascist intent.……
“Empathy feeds the competitive victimhood mentality that is rampant in our society,” he writes. “The same empathetic logic lies beneath the societal indulgence of criminality that particularly plagues progressive cities (always provided that the criminal is a member of some aggrieved group), as well as the empathetic paralysis that prevents western nations from wisely and justly addressing the challenges of both legal and illegal immigration. Compassion for refugees and ‘kids in cages’ is used to open the border to millions of able-bodied young men. But nowhere is this pathological feminine empathy more evident than in the various controversies surrounding transgenderism.”
This is pure Maga red meat, largely untethered from any version of reality, secular or otherwise (the US criminal justice system is notoriously punitive compared with other western countries; crime rates in US cities are near historic lows; Jesus’s calls to “love thy neighbor” and “welcome the stranger” did not specify by age, gender or physical ability, etc).
But it is useful for those devout Trump supporters who are looking for Christian-coded justifications of their political beliefs…..
It also helps explain how Rigney, who may once have been too extreme for American Christians like Mohler, has found an audience among Christians seeking to reconcile Trump’s increasingly inhumane positions with their faith.
“Everything about Trump flies in the face of orthodox Christianity,” Compton said. “His policy agenda is the opposite of traditional Christian compassion. So I think it’s not surprising that there’s a market for books, podcasts and other content that tells people who like Trump that there’s nothing wrong with liking Trump, and, in fact, that Trump’s doing exactly what the Bible or Christianity demands.”……..
www.theguardian.com
Good (and long) read on the rights war on empathy and how it’s necessary to reconcile their support, love and slavish devotion to 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……..
How we relate to the pain of others is a question that always lurks beneath our politics, but it’s one that is particularly relevant now.
In its first months, the Trump administration has begun to implement a radical rightwing regime featuring mass deportations without due process, draconian cuts to domestic and foreign aid programs, and venally self-interested foreign policy – a set of policies that amount to a prescription for mass suffering and death.
Whether Trump succeeds or fails in his quest to remake US society is very much a question of how much of the pain of others Americans are willing to abide in the pursuit of making America great again.
The rightwing movement against empathy seeks to dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society – our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering. We should see the campaign against empathy by Trump supporters for what it is: a flashing red light warning of fascist intent.……
“Empathy feeds the competitive victimhood mentality that is rampant in our society,” he writes. “The same empathetic logic lies beneath the societal indulgence of criminality that particularly plagues progressive cities (always provided that the criminal is a member of some aggrieved group), as well as the empathetic paralysis that prevents western nations from wisely and justly addressing the challenges of both legal and illegal immigration. Compassion for refugees and ‘kids in cages’ is used to open the border to millions of able-bodied young men. But nowhere is this pathological feminine empathy more evident than in the various controversies surrounding transgenderism.”
This is pure Maga red meat, largely untethered from any version of reality, secular or otherwise (the US criminal justice system is notoriously punitive compared with other western countries; crime rates in US cities are near historic lows; Jesus’s calls to “love thy neighbor” and “welcome the stranger” did not specify by age, gender or physical ability, etc).
But it is useful for those devout Trump supporters who are looking for Christian-coded justifications of their political beliefs…..
It also helps explain how Rigney, who may once have been too extreme for American Christians like Mohler, has found an audience among Christians seeking to reconcile Trump’s increasingly inhumane positions with their faith.
“Everything about Trump flies in the face of orthodox Christianity,” Compton said. “His policy agenda is the opposite of traditional Christian compassion. So I think it’s not surprising that there’s a market for books, podcasts and other content that tells people who like Trump that there’s nothing wrong with liking Trump, and, in fact, that Trump’s doing exactly what the Bible or Christianity demands.”……..
Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy
Trump’s actions are irreconcilable with Christian compassion. But an unholy alliance seeks to cast empathy as a parasitic plague
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