BANGKOK, Thailand, Mar 19 (IPS) – “The fundamental weakness is empathy,” Musk recently told radio podcast host Joe Rogan. “There is a bug, which is the empathy response.”
As Musk has established himself as at least the second most powerful person in an administration seeking a wholesale remaking of institutions, rules and norms, what he said matters, because it encapsulates a political plan. What the Project 2025 report set out in over 900 turgid pages, Musk’s remark captures in a simple pithy mantra for the social media age.
And as (let us acknowledge it) the Trump revolution is currently popular with at least large parts of the US electorate, and some overseas too, what Musk said summarises also the worldview of a social-cultural moment and movement on the march.
Core to the argument against empathy is the claim that ethical and practical considerations run counter to each other. The guardrails of rules and norms about caring for others, it argues, don’t only hold us back, they tie our hands behind our back.
Morality is for losers, it suggests, and who wants to lose? Only when we cut ourselves free of the burden of looking after and looking out for others, it posits, can we soar. The practical applications of this worldview are all encompassing.
They include the ripping up of international cooperation, the gutting of life-saving programmes for people in poverty abroad and at home, and the violating of due process for protestors, prisoners, migrants, minorities and anyone (who can be made to be) unpopular. That’s not how it ends, that’s how it starts.
A collapse of empathy would be an existential threat to the world. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on her witness to, and escape from, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, concluded “the death of empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” The stakes are too high for us to fail.
So how can we respond to the argument against empathy?
One way would be to stick only to ethics, arguing, simply, “it is our duty to sacrifice for others, and failing to do so is just wrong!” This has driven what has come to be known as the charity narrative.
This approach seems like a flawed strategy because by refusing to engage in the practicality conversation, it concedes it to the cynics and nihilists, accepting the framing of morality as a kind of self-immolation that brings only noble suffering and that cares only about stances, not consequences.
Another way would be to give up on ethics, and make only the most selfish arguments for doing good, like “we should not show ourselves to be unreliable because that would get us knocked off the top perch by our rivals when we must be Number One!” This too seems like a flawed strategy because it reinforces variations of dog-eat-dog as the only frames for success.
What both of those approaches get wrong is that they accept the frame that ethics and practicality are separate. Older wisdoms have long understood them as inseparable. What can in current debates seem like a rivalrous relationship between “what is good?” and “what is smart?”, or “what is moral?” and “what is wise?”, we often find when we look more deeply is not.
That often, the way in which societies developed moral principles was that they are ways to abstract what people have learnt from experience works. When, for example, people say in the African principle of Ubuntu “I am because you are”, that is not just a moral or theological point, it is literally true.
It is what public health teaches us: that I am healthy because my neighbour is healthy. (Even Musk was forced to concede to public pressure on this with his partial admission that “with USAID, one of the things we cancelled, accidentally, was Ebola prevention, and I think we all want Ebola prevention.”
Fearful of the reaction to his initial cancellation of Ebola prevention, he even claimed, falsely, to have fixed that “mistake” straight away, but what matters here is that the case against Ebola prevention collapsed so fast because interdependence was so quickly understood.)
So too, history has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbour is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbour thrives. Perhaps, for oligarchs, a ruthless, rule-less, world can work. (Perhaps not, however, when the fall-out comes between the “two bros”.)
But for the 99.9% of us, as John Donne wrote, “no man is an island”. We are interdependent and inseparable. Alone we are weak but together we are strong. Or, as the brilliant bleak joke of old ascribed to Benjamin Franklin put it, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.”
The mutual interest argument, which highlights to people “we each have a stake in the well-being of all, looking out for others is not losing,” does not take us away from values, it reinforces them.
“There is an interrelated structure of reality. We are all tied in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” That was Revd Martin Luther King in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and yet he was making an argument that you could say is the argument of mutual interest.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.” Interdependence, as a practical frame, reflects on the situation of that person, and comes through that reflection to understand that “I need to connect, as that could next time be me.”
Morality and wisdom guide us in the same direction; and as the fastest way there is empathy, that makes empathy not humanity’s weakness but our superpower.
Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality.
IPS UN Bureau
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