Not even a year into the second Trump presidency, and the madness only escalates, even as many are now pointing to signs of its imminent demise. Don’t be too sure…about the madness, about the demise? Both? Neither?
The end of DOGE, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, after only eight months, underscores an abject failure, but not without hundreds of thousands of human lives lost due to extreme cuts in vital American food and medical aid.
The epochal impact of Trump’s withdrawal of support for Ukraine is something the planet may eventually never recover from. It has poised a 14th century mindset in the form of the Putin regime to overrun the most socially and scientifically advanced continent on earth.
When the dust clears, depending on how bad it gets, maybe for a couple million years, we can hope enough endures to allow a valid analysis of what really went wrong, what’s going wrong now.
It’s more fundamental than most people think. It’s not about politics, per se. It’s about the issues that make us human, or not, and will, going forward, should we survive, AI or not.
If there is one single word that sums up what the challenge facing us is really all about, it is the word, “empathy.” Are you for or against it?
“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” claims Elon Musk, the world’s single richest man.
“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism,” counters Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the brilliant observer and author of the most authoritative works on the roots of totalitarianism.
Going back a few thousand years to the founding of western civilization, Plato wrote, “The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.”
But in addition to inventing fascism, union busting and political assassinations, those who have taken to defending wealth, however obtained, against those upon whom they rely for its maintenance have invested countless resources on cultivating a social science academia whose purpose is simply to justify what they do.
This academic overlay on society has been in the business of cooking up ways to keep the rich getting richer and the rest of us putting up with it.
Everything that counts for modern culture is infused with this. Its goal is not to defend democracy. On the contrary, it reviles it, and only gives it lip-service at best.
So, the enemy, as Musk defines it, is empathy, that most human quality which ties us together as a species. It is what we experience first, as helpless babes incapable of taking care of ourselves, relying fully on others who care enough to provide what we can’t provide for ourselves. It is the empathy of the other, the mother, the parent, the carer, upon which our very survival depends.
True science has studied and shown that, in nature, empathetic social binding is more important even than physical reproduction in determining the successful survival of a culture. The great natural scientist, the Pulitzer Prize-winning E. O. Wilson (1929-2021) showed this.
But the attack on empathy has been largely through the social weapon of radical individualism. In the modern day, among other things, it is through the vehicle of what’s now called Christian nationalism, a heretical form of false religion which situates “salvation” in the vertical relationship between the individual person and his or her “savior.” That is by contrast to the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition that places empathy, empathy toward the less fortunate and for justice and peace, at the center of faith and purpose.
In the 1970s, the so-called “human potential movement” of “self-actualization” was based on ego-stripping and sensory deprivation methods to rid persons of their empathetic tendencies and it was sold to thousands of corporate entities on the idea it would improve productivity of its middle management.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault replaced the central role of empathy with pleasure and power as the only valid factors in human behavior. His popularity on the left in the 1970s proved a critical component of American society’s turn to selfishness in that decade.
