The Troubling Lack of Empathy Among Conservatives

Empathy is a nasty word to conservatives. Elon Musk recently showed his contempt for the very notion of considering another’s feelings, calling it “civilizational suicidal empathy.” And then, to make sure everyone knew his views, the technocrat added in an interview with fellow rightwing MAGA cultist Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” Which means he sees empathy as a weakness he can exploit.

Information-warfare.com noted, “Musk’s perspective on empathy aligns with certain ideological frameworks, particularly technocracy and the Dark Enlightenment [DE] movement. These ideologies do not prioritize empathy as a guiding principle but instead emphasize efficiency, hierarchy, and rational decision-making over emotional or moral considerations.” ‘Rational’ and ‘efficiency’ in this context are, of course, merely opinions based on the holder’s personal views; a perspective not an absolute truth or a process.*

(Musk is not the only Silicon Valley billionaire who subscribes to the toxic beliefs: “Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are both influential figures in Silicon Valley who have been associated with the Dark Enlightenment ideology. They have supported politicians like JD Vance, who is seen as part of this movement. U.S. Vice President JD Vance has been influenced by [Curtis] Yarvin’s ideas and is supported by tech billionaires like Peter Thiel.”)

Calling a conservative empathic is almost as evil to them as being called “woke” — another term that conflates caring, compassion, and consideration for others; all of which make conservatives break out in hives when they think they may be infected by even one of them. Self-interest and controlling others are their main platforms, leavened with greed, cruelty, and disdain.

Julia Wong wrote a piece for The Guardian newspaper, titled Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy. In it, she wrote (emphasis added):

The idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right. Musk learned about “suicidal empathy” through his “public bromance” with Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable social media following. By Saad’s accounting – and this is not dissimilar from the white nationalist “great replacement theory” – western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries…
The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump and his agenda as a “sin” or “toxin”. The debate has emerged among Catholics too, with JD Vance recently using the medieval Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” to justify the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and foreign aid. (Vance’s stance – that it’s righteous to privilege the needs of one’s family, community and nation over those of the rest of the world – earned a rebuke from the pope, but support from other influential Catholic thinkers.)
The rightwing movement against empathy seeks to dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society – our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering. We should see the campaign against empathy by Trump supporters for what it is: a flashing red light warning of fascist intent.

While it’s no surprise to political observers that the extreme rightwing, racist misanthrope Musk — aka the SpaceNazi, aka Muskolini — and the president he co-owns with Putin despise anything that suggests equality, compassion, and caring, what is more worrisome is that almost everyone in both major conservative political parties in Canada and the USA — and in other allegedly liberal democracies — share those authoritarian, anti-empathy views. And worldwide, too, from Putin’s oppressive police state Russia to Kim Jung Un’s Stalinist North Korea, Orban’s Hungary, Javier Milei’s Argentina, Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, Nigel Farage’s UK party, and others: empathy, compassion, social obligation, collective responsibility to others, equality and inclusion, and the greater good are being washed away in the political tsunami of rightwing anger, hate, rage-farming, attacks, and aggressive dis/misinformation campaigns.

Not coincidentally, most if not all of these world leaders and their parties are allies and admirers of Trump. Little wonder Canada’s PoiLIEvre is nicknamed Mini-Trump and his followers are called the Maple MAGA.

Although not alone in his views, Musk has a public record for blatant lack of empathy. For example, in October 2022, Musk bought Twitter and fired about 6,000 of its employees — 80 percent of the workforce — without warning or even notice. Many of those employees only learned they had been fired when they came to work and found they had no access to company systems. He has since shown the same attitude towards US federal employees; his neo-fascist DOGE agency has arbitrarily fired roughly 62.000 public servants, and thousands of federal contracts have been cancelled without warning, leading to terminations in the private sector as well.

In the USA, the MAGA Repugnicans are infamous for their lack of empathy — for anyone outside their party, anyone in need, anyone in the working class, anyone of a different skin colour, anyone of a different religion, for immigrants, for the poor, for the unemployed, for the sick and the vulnerable, for refugees, for the victims of mass shootings, for Ukrainians, for children, and for women in general. Even dogs are treated with disdain: look at how MAGA embraced puppy-killer Kristi Noem. Trump rewarded her heartlessness with a key role in his cabinet, in charge of cosplay with immigrant kidnappers.

The notorious lack of empathy among American conservatives (and especially the pseudo-Christian nationalists among them — aka the Talibangelists and Christofascists) is not new, but has accelerated exponentially since Trump made the Repugnican Party into his own heartless, selfish, and greedy MAGA cult. There was no MAGA outrage during Trump’s first term in office when his enforcers put immigrants into cells and took their children away from parents and stuffed them into cages, alone and frightened. There was no MAGA outrage when Trump announced he would reopen those detention centres this term and put kidnapped immigrant children back into cages.**

There is no MAGA outrage now when Trump’s enforcers kidnap people off the street and send them to hellish forced-labour concentration camps in other countries. Or when they pass a budget bill to tax the workers so billionaires and millionaires can pay less; a bill designed to strip millions of the most vulnerable Americans of their medical care to pay for the billionaires’ tax cuts. There is no MAGA outrage over Putin’s continued war against Ukraine. There is no MAGA outrage over the genocide taking place in Gaza, either; in fact MAGA praises Israel, as it does Putin.

The rejection of empathy (and anything even vaguely sympathetic towards outsiders and others) is tribal: baked into the MAGA ideology, but our own Conservative leader, the rage-farming Trump mimic Pierre PoiLIEvre, apparently shares it, based on his voting record against workers, women, dental and pharma care, affordable housing, daycare, children, and indigenous people, combined with his arrogant persona and the comments he constantly presents in public. As Greenpeace writes of PoiLIEvre’s policies:

This is not about fiscal restraint. It’s about stripping away the systems that many of us rely on to survive and thrive. It’s about making life harder for people navigating poverty, housing precarity, chronic illness, disability, single parenthood, systemic racism, colonial legacies, gender-based violence. And then telling them it’s their fault.

PoilLIEvre’s adversarial, rage-and-attack-based political style is “leadership without empathy,” as one opinion site says, adding (emphasis added),

Poilievre, like Trump, shows little empathy for those outside his political base. His dismissal of harm-reduction programs, indifference to the impacts of climate inaction, and punitive approach to municipalities reveal a leader more interested in punishing opponents than uplifting communities.

In her essay, The Death of Compassion, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” So here we are now, watching the US slide into barbarism. Michael Corthell wrote about Arendt’s warning, “Arendt’s warning is not just historical—it is deeply relevant today. While overt barbarism may not always be immediately visible, the slow erosion of empathy is already shaping our world in troubling ways.” Slow, however, is not the speed at which Trump and his allies are eroding and eradicating empathy. They have the metaphorical pedal to the metal in their efforts.

Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Tarcher 2009), wrote in his book. “Empathy is the very means by which we create social life and advance civilization. In short, it is the extraordinary evolution of empathic consciousness that is the quintessential underlying story of human history… Empathic development and the development of selfhood go hand in hand and accompany the increasingly complex energy-consuming social structures that make up the human journey.”

But the concept of empathy itself is barely more than a century old; the word was first used in English in the decade before WWI, following a translation of a German word used in psychology, Einfühlung (“feeling-in”), itself coined from the Greek empatheia (from em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’). In 1908 two psychologists from Cornell and the University of Cambridge suggested “empathy” for Einfühlung, and it stuck. The derived term “empathize” was added to the language around 1917. Even then, it didn’t rise into common use until the 1950s. Trump has expressed his desire to return America to the days of the robber barons of the Industrial Revolution, before the word empathy was coined.

It’s not that empathy didn’t exist, just that our vocabulary did not have a term for it and words like animation, play, aesthetic sympathy, and semblance were used in its place. Adam Smith, the 18th-century economist, published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759. In it he wrote about how “moral sentiments — primarily sympathy—socialize and moderate our passions.” He didn’t use the word empathy because it wasn’t invented then. But the entire first section of his book, five chapters collectively titled Of the Sense of Propriety, was about sympathy and how it civilized and motivated us. He opens the book with:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

He later adds a definition that is parallel to our modern view of empathy:

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself.

And yet, despite how conservatives love to embrace  Smith’s later work, The Wealth of Nations and his “invisible hand of the market,” few if any seem to have read Moral Sentiments. True, conservatives don’t actually like to read and prefer to ban books rather than read them. And Smith’s books are rather challenging and thought-provoking works about economics or morality; two topics that conservatives constantly rail on about, without expressing any evidence they understand them or have read his books (think of their ill-informed comments about abortion and tariffs, respectively). Can you imagine the fascist dictator Trump reading something as long as a two-page memo, let alone a whole book? Me, either. Nor can I imagine Pierre PoiLIEvre reading either book — although he is somewhat smarter than Trump — because it would distract from his policy of rage-farming and insulting.***

Our new Canadian Liberal Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has read both and written even a book (before he became a politician) in which he comments on them: Value(s). Writing about that book and Carney’s views,  blogger Clark Bryan wrote (emphasis added):

Firstly, he believes that societal values extend beyond economic metrics. He believe that art and culture contribute to our collective well-being, identity and sense of community. Carney also believes that art and culture build social capital, empathy, shared experiences and foster trust and cooperation.

Canadians can only hope that Carney proves true to his words now he is in office. We need a leader with empathy right now, as a bulwark against the rising tide of the lack of same among conservatives on both sides of the border. If Carney means what he wrote, we may have found that leader. Time will tell. Meanwhile, we must fight the slide into the rightwing abyss of hatred and cruelty lest it infect us further here in Canada.

Notes:

* Information-warface.com continues (emphasis added):

The Dark Enlightenment (Neoreactionary Movement), associated with figures like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), is explicitly anti-democratic and rejects Enlightenment-era ideals such as equality and universal human rights. The movement is characterized by:

• Hierarchical, elitist governance (favoring monarchies or corporate rule over democracy).
• A rejection of mass democracy in favor of rule by “superior” elites.
• A belief that empathy weakens civilization by enabling policies that slow progress or prioritize weaker societal groups.

Under the Dark Enlightenment worldview:

• Empathy is seen as a liability that leads to poor governance, welfare dependency, and societal stagnation.
• Policies should be dictated by power and competence, not compassion.
• Decisions should favor strong, intelligent elites rather than the collective well-being of the masses.

Many billionaires, including Musk, subscribe — either knowingly or subconsciously — to elements of this ideology, where strong, centralized control by a select elite is viewed as preferable to messy democratic governance… These trends are not unique to Musk. The billionaire class — through AI development, automation, wealth hoarding, and political influence — is pushing for a future where empathy is discarded in favor of pure efficiency and control.

Financial Times adds,

…one of the weirdest and most disturbing developments is the rise of the “neo-reactionary movement” (NRx), also called Dark Enlightenment. The name alone is spooky and intriguing. NRx is an ideology founded by the British philosopher Nick Land and the American software developer Curtis Yarvin … The philosophy argues that democracy inherently leads to social decline, because of the development of deep state bureaucracies that are unable to control oligarchic forces, and that societies should be run like corporations, with a kind of CEO Monarch in charge. As Yarvin has said, “If Americans want to change their government, they need to get rid of dictator phobia . . . One way of dealing with that is . . . hire two executives and make sure they work together and there is really no other solution . . . ” Are Trump and Musk those people? Some think so.

Wikipedia adds (emphasis added):

The Dark Enlightenment, also called the neo-reactionary movement or neoreactionarism (abbreviated to NRx), is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and reactionary philosophical and political movement. A reaction against Enlightenment values, it favors a return to traditional societal constructs and forms of government such as absolute monarchism and cameralism.  Influenced by libertarianism, the movement advocates for authoritarian capitalist city-states which compete for citizens. Neoreactionaries refer to contemporary liberal society and institutions which they oppose as ‘the Cathedral’, associating them with the Puritan church, and their goals of egalitarianism and democracy as “the Synopsis”. They claim that the Cathedral influences public discourse to promote progressivism and political correctness, which they view as a threat to Western civilization. The movement also espouses scientific racism, a pseudoscientific view which they claim is suppressed by the Cathedral.
A 2025 anonymous letter of a group of self-described former followers of the neoreactionary movement warned that the movement advocated for “techno-monarchism” in which its ruler would use “data systems, artificial intelligence, and advanced algorithms to manage the state, monitor citizens, and implement policies.” It further warned that Elon Musk, in the context of his actions at the Department of Government Efficiency, was working “for his own power and the broader neo-reactionary agenda.“

The Public Medievalist adds (emphasis added):

If you read posts by DE leaders like “Mencius Moldbug” or Nick Land, you would be forgiven for thinking that a Victorian social Darwinist has time-traveled into Silicon Valley. Like the Victorians before them, DEers fetishize the medieval West as the height of white greatness, a time when every race was in its proper geographical place, allowing white civilization to thrive in isolation. And like social Darwinists, they twist science, philosophy, and logic to rationalize what is, at its core, an emotional response: the fear of lost power and privilege in a globalizing, equalizing world.
Unsurprisingly, DE proponents also believe in biologically inevitable gender roles. As the DE subreddit claims:
“Recognition of HBD necessitates the rejection of the core progressive dogma of egalitarianism. Race and gender are not social constructs and everyone personally experiences that not all men or women are created equal. It is easier to believe in Leprechauns than to believe in egalitarianism.”

** Gil Duran, writing on Framelab, comments:

The idea of supposed Christians opposing empathy is especially telling. Jesus Christ quite famously preached in favor of empathy, and it is not clear why anyone who sides with Musk and Trump over Christ can still claim to be a Christian.

The answer is that those people are not Christian, regardless of how they see themselves or what they claim. They are pseudo-Christians. They are not concerned with faith, merely with power, money, and controlling others. Duran also adds that, “The war on empathy is a war on democracy.” The Trump regime is, of course, very anti-democracy and is attempting to implement its theocratic-style totalitarian state on the USA. So far, they are succeeding.

*** Wikipedia:

The invisible hand is a metaphor inspired by the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith that describes the incentives which free markets sometimes create for self-interested people to accidentally act in the public interest, even when this is not something they intended. Smith originally mentioned the term in two specific, but different, economic examples. It is used once in his Theory of Moral Sentiments when discussing a hypothetical example of wealth being concentrated in the hands of one person, who wastes his wealth, but thereby employs others. More famously, it is also used once in his Wealth of Nations, when arguing that governments do not normally need to force international traders to invest in their own home country. In both cases, Adam Smith speaks of an invisible hand, never of the invisible hand.

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