“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” --Elon Musk

I have previously characterised conservatism as primarily a lack of empathy. This quote does not bode well for America.

As a corollary:

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

• Edmund Burke

This seems to have been bastardized by history into the following much more well known, but never actually directly stated:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

What were the words of Elmo musk again? That there is too much empathy in the world? Fo figure

The definition of empathy: "the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation"

Yes. By definition, if you are able to feel empathy - I.e., if you can put yourself in another person's shoes - you wouldn't behave like any sycophant in the world, from Trump and his hateful MAGA's, to Putin, to Netanyahu, to Musk, and each and every single agent of chaos and unchecked greed attempting to mess around with mankind as if they were self-proclaimed messiahs and not the representation of humanity's own cancer cells.

His observations were correct and can be applied to many situations and places worldwide. We are held back by hate and lack of empathy. We are unable to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors.

Psychopaths are physically incapable of it since birth though, not through any fault of their own, yet most are completely normal everyday people that don't commit atrocities 🤷‍♂️

You see this with zionists and in Israel

But if I'm right and they're wrong then it's ok.

/S

There's a whole camp of folks on Lemmy that appear to disagree with the verdicts of Nuremburg, which is something I never expected. When it comes to Julius Striecher, a couple people feel injustice.

Like I get strict death penalty abolitionism, but damn if that's the example to hold onto. A hell of a test case.

INB4 "vegans bad" but I think this is also reflected in how we treat animals. I know I couldn't kill an a cow, a chicken or a pig. I see in them the same will to live in peace as I see in my fellow humans and empathy makes it so that I would see it as cruel to rob them of it.

Edit: the plants rights activists have found this comment. It's interesting, the same refusal to recognize reality, our shared reality, in which for example plants are not sentient while non-human animals are and are therefore deserving of empathy, this refusal is also at the root of fascism. People who are open to fascism refuse to recognize the reality in which a jewish person is not worse than any other person, in which immigrants aren't worse than your average neighbour down the street and in which trans people deserve as much a right to be left alone as they claim for themselves.

Wow, this is so true. Keep in mind there's technically no such thing as cold. Or dark. What we call that is simply the measure of the absence of warmth or light. I think the same thing applies to empathy...