"Empathy is Bad" - One More Wormhole MAGA Invites You Into

Trumpers contort their morals to fit their ideology

Empathy is optional. Not only that, it’s a weakness. This is according to chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk, who seems to have taken particular glee in firing thousands of federal workers without notice, including on Valentine's Day.

Pete Hegseth wants to dispense with the laws of war. Donald Trump’s withdrawal of surveillance information from Ukraine led to dozens of civilian deaths. Marjorie Taylor Greene brazenly harasses colleagues — and children of colleagues — by posting photos of herself holding guns. Doug Collins wants to cut 80,000 employees at the VA, claiming in a stunning example of doublethink that it will not affect the quality of care for those who served our country and are now struggling with health issues.

Even conservative religious leaders are lining up to endorse an empathy-free lifestyle. So-called Christian theologian Joe Rigney’s book, The Sin of Empathy, warns that liberals manipulate people by appealing to their inclination to compassion. The message is thus: don’t give in to empathy.

So-called Christian nationalist pastor Josh McPherson takes it further, saying the word empathy needs to be struck out of our vocabulary because “empathy is dangerous, empathy is toxic, empathy will align you with hell.” He also warns that women are particularly susceptible to empathy and, therefore, must be closely supervised by their husbands.

Munch , 1895, "”The Scream,” lithograph. Creative Commons imagery courtesy of Steven Zucker.

What a world without empathy leads to

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Without empathy, there’s no ability to value the concerns of others as equal to your own, and therefore no basis for putting the Golden Rule into practice.

Once you dispense with “treat your neighbor as yourself,” it’s a free fall into a universe without morals. What’s left to guide you? How then should you treat your neighbors? Ninety percent as well as yourself? Fifty percent? Zero percent, in the case of neighbors you don’t like?

When the Golden Rule is stripped away, all you’re left with is, “Treat your neighbor any damn way you want.”

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

-Frans de Waal

It’s no coincidence that Trump, Musk, and other MAGA supporters have made public gestures resembling Nazi salutes. It’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf at his bedside. The resemblances between the MAGA and Nazi criticism of empathy is not a coincidence either. The sobering truth is, in their disdain for compassion, the MAGA movement and the Nazi movement truly are aligned.

Underlying Hitler’s legacy of atrocity was a contempt for empathy. This contempt was underscored when he said, “Conscience is a Jewish invention.” Swap the word liberal for Jewish, and it could have been said by Trump. At another time, Hitler condemned progressive politics, saying, “Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice.” Similar to the Nazis, the MAGA movement is less concerned with universal human rights and more concerned with the rights of an elite few.

Hitler also said, “Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality.” This remark about political power could as well have been voiced by Trump. The Trump administration's recent deportation of Venezuelan immigrants to prison in El Salvador serves as a case in point.

The lack of empathy — indeed, the cruelty — of fascist regimes is not a side effect or a means to an end. It’s means and end. It’s inseparable from fascism. This dark truth about fascism and empathy was recognized by Captain G.M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials. Of this experience, Gilbert wrote:

In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945–1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy. — Captain G. M. Gilbert

Decades before Hitler, Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, provided a terrifying exploration of the inverse relationship between empathy and evil. The novel’s antagonist is Kurtz, a European who enslaves and dehumanizes Africans in his pursuit of ivory. The severed human heads Kurtz has placed around his compound are a sign — and threat — of his moral depravity. Kurtz, however, is not an uncouth lunatic. Instead, he is known for his artistic ability, charisma, and eloquence.

Conrad understood the intoxicating and addictive nature of power derived from cruelty. His character, Kurtz, becomes a prisoner of his own reign of terror. Conrad wrote, “He hated all this, and somehow he couldn’t get away.” Kurtz’s deathbed pronunciation, “The horror! The horror!” results from a glimpse of the emptiness of his soul. All pretense of morality has been stripped away. Nothing that connects him to other human beings remains.

Military helicopters fly a mission in Vietnam. Creative Commons image. Courtesy of Robert Sullivan.

Conrad’s dire warning was modernized and re-packaged in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, which provides an even more revelatory truth. The Kurtz character of the film describes the type of person he needs to vanquish the enemy:

You have to have men who are moral ... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling ... without passion ... without judgment ... without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly.

In other words, Kurtz believes he would be unstoppable if he had an army of men without a sense of right and wrong. To have that, he would need an army of men wholly without empathy.

Darkening the human heart

One needs to look no further than Middle Eastern terrorist training camps to understand the process by which people can be radicalized to the point they lose the capacity for empathy and are therefore capable of acts of cruelty:

(1) Social isolation. Inductees are removed from family, friends, and anyone who might have a moderating effect.

(2) Indoctrination. Inductees are fed a select diet of extreme ideas. Combined with #1 above, this results in a mental distortion in which abstract ideas become more important than people.

(3) Dehumanization. Inductees are taught that the enemy is evil or subhuman. Combined with #1 and #2 above, this results in willingness — and even eagerness — to discard moral norms and participate in acts of cruelty.

Even aside from the opportunity to enroll in a militia training camp, the conditions for radicalization are widespread in America today. Data shows Americans are more socially isolated than ever before. This isolation results from economic disparity, nomadic lifestyles, and poor work/life balance. Meanwhile, ample opportunity for indoctrination is available from cable TV, political podcasts, and curated social media feeds. Dehumanizing rhetoric is rampant: both sides of the political spectrum increasingly express contempt for the other. The MAGA movement, especially, has become known for dehumanizing perceived enemies — all those it labels as liberal, progressive, or woke.

Opening doors. Groundswell Mural Proect, Ellis Island, NY. Public domain image.

Empathy is not a betrayal of one’s cause.

— Megan Phelps-Roper

In praise of empathy

Empathy is a sin? Empathy is a weakness? I’d love to see Elon Musk try to share his esoteric insights on empathy with a live audience of recently fired federal workers. I’d love to see Musk or Trump try to soliloquize about the evils of empathy in front of a group of social workers, counselors, or doctors; to a group of teachers, firemen, or veterans. I’d love to see them try to say it in front of a group of parents of children with special needs, or of adult children taking care of their aging parents.

The point is that they wouldn’t say it. They wouldn’t because they wouldn’t put themselves in a position to speak to a diverse audience that doesn’t necessarily agree with them. The point is they’re afraid of dialogue. They are idealogues living privileged, insulated lives who know nothing about — and have no interest in — the cares, concerns, hopes, and dreams, of people like you and me

All that’s civil in civilization has been built of generosity, philanthropy, service, community spirit, and belief in justice and the public good. Take these things away, and you don’t have civilization. You have something uncivilized, and from there, it gets ugly fast.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it. — Maya Angelou

The surest way to inoculate ourselves against the gravitational pull of wormholes is — in our daily lives — to interact with a cross-section of America.

What may yet save us from fascism is that the vast majority of Americans are decent people. Even those with hardened hearts can still feel the pull of empathy. Most of them, at least.

While some conservatives can be led to dehumanize and wish ill on an abstract woke liberal on the other side of the country, they may find it more difficult to muster the same feelings against their next-door neighbor — especially if that neighbor is someone they at least occasionally have personal contact with.

So that really is the solution — for people on both sides. We need more person-to-person contact, more dialogue, and more empathy. Not less.

We need to step away from our screens, open our doors, walk out into our neighborhoods, and say good morning to the people walking their dogs, raking their lawns, and tending their gardens. In other words, we need to go out of our way to re-humanize each other.

Not only is it the right thing to do, but it’s for our own benefit — and protection. The more we humanize ourselves, the more we protect ourselves against being dehumanized by others.

If our country veers further towards fascism, liberals won’t be able to protect liberals because liberals will have no voice. The only source of protection will be neighbors who are conservatives — people who disagree politically but know us, respect us, recognize our humanity, and are willing to stand up for us despite our differences.