During his most recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk levelled a critique at empathy, calling it “the fundamental weakness of western civilization.”
If your first instinct is to brush this off as another example of Musk’s awkwardness, we suggest you think again. As journalist Julia Carrie Wong noted in The Guardian in April, Musk’s comments have appeared “amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right.”
A diverse coalition of figures have taken up this “war on empathy,” including pastor Joe Rigney, conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and marketing professor Gad Saad.
Each has coined their own meme-able phrase: “The Sin of Empathy,” “Toxic Empathy” and “Suicidal Empathy,” respectively.
You may find a war on empathy perplexing — even downright dangerous — given that our contemporary global historical moment is one marked by climate-induced migration, rising political authoritarianism and a “relentless opposition” against LGBTQIA+ rights.
Doesn’t this moment call out for more empathy rather than less?
What is empathy anyway?
But first, we need to know what we are talking about.
Some recent criticisms of empathy have been premised on bad definitions. For instance, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently claimed that empathy is “destructive” for immigration policy because “empathy means never having to say no.” This definition is not accurate.
Though a precise definition of empathy still eludes us, empathy is simply the ability to feel what someone else might be feeling. “Imagining yourself in another’s place,” writes neurologist Richard E. Cytowic, “is the basis of empathy.” Coming from a different angle, literary scholar Suzanne Keen defines empathy as “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect” that “can be provoked… even by reading.”
The word “empathy” was coined in 1909. Previously, what we today call “empathy” fell under the name “sympathy.” For instance, writing in the 18th century, Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith described sympathy as the imaginative capacity to “enter as it were into [another’s] body, and become in some measure the same person.”
With the discovery of “mirror neurons,” modern neuroscience has in a sense validated Smith’s theories. As neuroscientist Christian Keysers explains: “The mirror system builds a bridge between the minds of two people,” showing that our brains are not only “deeply social” but also “magically connected to each other.”
Put simply, we are hardwired for empathy.
Sympathy and social contagion
In our research, we have explored literary depictions of self-destructive, suicidal and monstrous sympathies. We recognize some parallels between MAGA’s war on empathy and conceptual debates of the past, parallels at times interesting and worrisome.
During his appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Saad criticized Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s appeal to Trump for mercy on behalf of undocumented immigrants and those in the LGBTQIA+ community, suggesting it was indicative of the “parasitic idea” of open borders and an example of “suicidal empathy.”
A few months later, Canadian pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson echoed Saad and told Rogan that today’s political left is vulnerable to those who “parasitize empathy.”
This association between empathy and parasitic contagion is not at all new.
As literary scholar Mary Fairclough explains, in the 18th and 19th centuries, sympathy was “understood as a disruptive social phenomenon which functioned to spread disorder and unrest between individuals and even across nations like a ‘contagion.’”
As an example, Fairclough quotes the author Thomas De Quincey, who opined that “many a man has been drawn, by the contagion of sympathy with his own class acting as a mob, into outrages of destruction.”
The writer Mary Shelley literalized this notion of contagious sympathy in her 1826 novel The Last Man, which depicts a (perhaps uncomfortably familiar) plague pandemic. The novel paints sympathy as a method of mass control and societal dissolution just as contagious as the plague.
But unlike De Quincey, Shelley also celebrates sympathy as our most valuable and effective collective resource in times of crisis. This celebration is most notable in the character of Adrian, who devotes his life to “bring[ing] patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease.’”
The uses and abuses of empathy
Much as Shelley suggests for sympathy, research shows that empathy must be properly channelled so it isn’t used to divide and manipulate.
For example, research shows that empathy is not impartial. People tend to empathize more easily with those who share their racial or social background, and less with those who are perceived as different. In other words, racial prejudices may bias our instinctive empathetic responses.
At the same time, empathy has been linked to problematic practices like racial impersonation and colonial appropriation, where members of dominant groups claim to identify with marginalized people in ways that often reinforce power imbalances rather than dismantle them.
But MAGA’s approach to empathy is less a well-meaning critique than an all-out war and comes at the issues with a far less benevolent set of assumptions and goals. As Wong noted: “We are witnessing the construction of the ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale.”
Consider what Musk said to Rogan regarding immigration:
“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.”
This comment is strikingly similar to the idea of “racial suicide” endorsed by eugenicist thinkers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Racial suicide was a concept rooted in the xenophobic fear that one’s own ethnic population would be replaced by another racialized population that happened to have a higher birth rate.
As the historian Rob Boddice notes, “eugenic morality” was “to be guided by sympathy construed as sympathy for the whole of society” rather than towards individuals. For the eugenicists, this ideology justified extreme measures, such as forced sterilizations and racial segregation. The horrors of eugenics and its influence on the Nazi Holocaust are well documented.
Despite these history lessons, Musk and his ilk, however, seem unperturbed and even enthusiastic about repeating history.
Much can be said about empathy’s potential limitations alongside its many virtues. But while MAGA supporters may have balked at her speech and her call for empathy, we would do well to remember the words of Bishop Budde:
“We should be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.”
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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