You might have heard about this one. Elon’s quote is slightly out of context, so people are arguing about it. Musk is known to be on the autism spectrum so you can expect some odd views of empathy from him. I’ll put that analysis in a second post.
What really interests me is how this is sort of central to world politics right now. At least half, and I hope way more than half of the world believes that compassion for others leads to a better life for themselves. You can call it enlightened self-interest, I call it a well-developed ethical system. Empathy and compassion are behind the rise of democracy and the partial dismantling of the colonial systems. But there is some sort of psychology, or some game theory playing out on a global scale. People get tired of helping others, they worry that they are being taken advantage of, that the system isn’t fair.
These aren’t all unfounded fears. But is the unfairness coming from the guy who was given a cookie while you had to work for yours, or is it the guy who owns the cookie factory? When we’re talking billions of dollars and nuclear weapons, its harder to sort it all out.
Musk takes advantage of that complexity. He successfully navigated the system and used money to make more money. Now he’s riding the wave of support that he gets because money is equated with having done something to deserve getting it. That mindset, rooted in centuries of economics, does not have a place for empathy.
A friend of mine found the details behind the quote. It may be that Musk has some empathy and even values it, but what he’s doing here is exploiting fears of people who have a lot less wealth than he does and switching to a conspiracy theory.
This from Politico: THE BUG’: Musk, in a sprawling interview released today with the conservative podcaster JOE ROGAN, said “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
“Empathy is good, but you need to think it through,” Musk said. But, he added, Democrats are “exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
The men were speaking about the conspiracy theory that drove Musk to back Trump last summer: That Democrats are intentionally moving undocumented immigrants into swing states to gain political power, and, eventually, one-party rule.
Musk explains, in his own words: “If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states not swing states. They would be blue states. They’d win the House, the Senate and the presidency. They would then make D.C. into a state, maybe Puerto Rico, get four extra senators, pack the Supreme Court, so then they’ll have the House, judiciary, Senate and presidency, all blue. And then they would keep importing more illegals to cement that outcome, basically what happened in California. It would have been the end.”
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve 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 man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
Gustave Mark Gilbert, American psychologist, who observed high-ranking Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials.
Musk is exploiting a phantasm of ultra right : “The great replacement”
The idea that the rich and the elites plot to substitute migrants from third world countries to the people living in the Western sates.
The worst is that more and more people believe it. 67 % of French people are worried.
This idea is a sham. I don’t need to demonstrate that here i believe.
Just one figure for the USA. According to the statistics I found, nearly a third of Asian and Latino Americans marry outside their communities of origin. Are children the replacements or the replaced?
I would be very careful about drawing conclusions of migrants votes only based on last presidential election.
Factually, many democrats voters did not vote, migrants and children of migrants among them.
When you say, that x % of Hispanic migrants and children voted for Trump, it does not mean that X% of all Hispanic migrants are Republican leaning.
Now, i don’t underestimate the phenomena. In France we have migrants and children of migrants who vote for the ultra right who wants to send them out, because they live in districts plagued by drugs and misdemeanors, where firemen and doctors cannot comme to do their jobs for them.
True. And important that more people understand it. The polls asking is the President is doing a good job are always below the actual vote. This is a recent phenomenon, of I remember correctly. Our electoral system is severely broken.
That’s not greed, that’s idiocy. Our immigration laws have needed change for many years but congress refused to act. Unlimited immigration destroyed native Americans. But some immigration is necessary. Canada handles it better than we do.
Conservatives love to accuse progressive politicians and premiers of being spendthrifts. But as the record clearly shows, they’re no better — and often far worse — when it comes to keeping government spending in check.
Of course they do. No one has said they don’t. The point of the BBC article was to point to ways of handling immigration that might be better than ours.
Your referenced article points to hate crimes as being a major problem. And yes, it’s true that racists are terrible for any society. We need to find a way to educate racists that they themselves are the problem, not those who might have a different level of melanin or come from a different culture.
And it may seem off topic, but science and our own evolution reveals a story, that puts the racist tropes to shame.
Of course in a world where the Golden Rule prevails: he who has the gold makes the rules - then racism is a very handy tool to manipulate people who prefer others to do their thinking for them.
In France, for 80 % of rapes, the guilty ones are people the woman knows, family, neighbors, colleagues and so.
Racists lead a campaign explaining that with no migrants, there would be no rapes.
Some one has found that
82.5% of suspected perpetrators of fatal accidents are men. 92% of drunk drivers involved in fatal accidents are men. 91% of drivers who tested positive for drugs in fatal accidents are also men.
If you take off the driving licenses of men, you decrease road death toll dramatically.
Not the point. Canada used to be much more accepting of immigrants but that has changed. Too much immigration too soon is the cause, which is why Coffee’s idea that Canada handles immigration better than we do is wrong.
