Julia Carrie Wong writes:

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 (pseudo)scientific 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.

Coined in 1908 as the English translation of the German “Einfühlung”, or “in-feeling”, empathy originally referred to the feelings a person might have when projecting herself into a piece of artwork or nature. It is now understood to mean both the effortful, cognitive process by which a person projects herself into another’s situation and point of view, and to the unconscious (and at times unwelcome) affective process by which another person’s emotions can influence or even take over one’s own. It is variously described as an innate characteristic and a skill that can be acquired and honed; some see in it the potential to learn, others to heal.

The study of empathy begins with a central mystery of subjective existence: what are the limits of the self? If I can be transported into a work of art or piece of music, can I also extend my consciousness into another person’s thoughts and feelings? It also speaks to one of the great quandaries of social life – that we can never really know what other people are thinking and feeling. Is your blue my blue? Is your pain my pain?

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. [Continue reading…]