Lack of Empathy, Musk, and Trump's heroine, Ayn Rand
Opinion by Thom Hartmann (warning: somewhat graphic content)
Back in the days when I was rostered by the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist and ran a residential treatment facility for severely abused children, one of the things I was painfully aware of was the lack of empathy (the ability to experience or identify with the feelings of others) displayed by psychopaths.
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And this embrace of psychopathy isn’t something new for Republicans; their disdain for empathy has deep roots that reach back a half-century or more.
Most recently, this broke into public consciousness when Elon Musk trash-talked empathy in an interview with Joe Rogan:
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization which is the empathy response. I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through, and not just be programmed like a robot.”
The “they” who are “exploiting” the “bug” of empathy are, of course, Democrats who believe one of the jobs of government is to provide for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And average Americans who think we should help the helpless, feed the hungry, heal the sick, house the homeless, provide a safety net for our elders, and care for and educate our children.
More about Rand's influence on the Republican party and DJT:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-the-republican-war-on-empathy-turned-america-into-a-playground-for-sociopaths-opinion/ar-AA1BTwgE
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“Rand taught “there is no such thing as the public interest,” that programs like Social Security and Medicare steal from “creators” and illegitimately redistribute their wealth. This was a “sublimely enticing argument for wealthy businessmen who had no interest whatever in the public interest.… Yet the taxpayers of America paid Rand’s and Frank O’Connor’s medical expenses.” Randians have offered many convoluted explanations for what her critics see as sheer hypocrisy. We may or may not find them persuasive.
In the simplest terms, Rand discovered at the end of her life that she was only human and in need of help. Rather than starve or drop dead—as she would have let so many others do—she took the help on offer. Rand died in 1982, as her admirer Alan Greenspan had begun putting her ideas into practice in Reagan’s administration, making sure, writes Weiss, that the system was “more favorable to the creators and entrepreneurs who were more valuable to society,” in his Randian estimation, “than people lower down the ladder of success.” After well over three decades of such policies, we can draw our own conclusions about the results.”
Some Russian aristocrat hero she was
Thus, the Conditioning. Then…
