Without water, nothing on Earth could live. However, you can also drown in an excess of water or watch everything you’ve ever loved get washed away by it. So, is water good or bad? Well, if you’ve spent a day in the desert without it and you get a glass, it’ll feel like the best thing on Earth. On the other hand, if you’re 15 feet from the surface of the water and your ankle is trapped under a big log, it can be the worst thing in the world.
Empathy is a lot like this.
That’s part of what Elon Musk was trying to get across in this clip that is floating around on X:
Elon Musk: We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. 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 fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I think, …
