“In my work with the defendants [at Nuremberg], 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.” — Captain Gustave Gilbert, the US army psychologist assigned to observe the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
You don’t expect moral leadership from mice. And yet, in a recent study, rodents showed more empathy, urgency, and compassion for strangers than the men currently shaping our nation’s future. While lab mice display empathy by resuscitating unconscious cage-mates, Trump and Musk gleefully slash food aid, housing support, and global relief efforts — all cheered on by a right-wing movement that now sees empathy as a fatal weakness.
Back in the days when I was rostered by the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist and ran a residential treatment facility for severely abused children, one of the things I was painfully aware of was the lack of empathy (the ability to experience or identify with the feelings of others) displayed by psychopaths.
Frankly, I couldn’t avoid them; at least half the parents of the kids in our care were easily identified as psychopaths or diagnosable with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). Watching today’s GOP I’m getting flashbacks.
And this embrace of psychopathy isn’t something new for Republicans; their disdain for empathy has deep roots that reach back a half-century or more.
Most recently, this broke into public consciousness when Elon Musk trash-talked empathy in an interview with Joe Rogan:
The “they” who are “exploiting” the “bug” of empathy are, of course, Democrats who believe one of the jobs of government is to provide for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And average Americans who think we should help the helpless, feed the hungry, heal the sick, house the homeless, provide a safety net for our elders, and care for and educate our children.“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization which is the empathy response. I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through, and not just be programmed like a robot.”
You know, like Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25.
That, in fact, is what’s normal not just for humans but for all mammals; empathy is one of the universal characteristics across our class of animals, as any pet owner can tell you. In a remarkable study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science last month, researchers knocked out mice with anesthesia and let them be found by other mice.
Even when they’re total strangers, the conscious mice did everything they could — including a mouse-like form of CPR — to revive their companions. They felt empathy and acted on it.
Contrast this with Republicans who shrug when told that millions will die because of the cutoff of USAID assistance to poor nations that cost a mere .3% of our federal budget. Or who sneer at people who need Medicaid, school lunches, or Social Security Disability aid.
Just during the past few weeks, Trump has cancelled a billion dollars worth of support to food banks here in America, another billion to help low-income people pay for housing, and is taking an axe to Social Security. And he and Musk are gleeful about it.
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