“The fundamental weakness is empathy,” Musk recently told radio podcast host Joe Rogan. “There is a bug, which is the empathy response.”
As Musk has established himself as at least the second most powerful person in an administration seeking a wholesale remaking of institutions, rules and norms, what he said matters, because it encapsulates a political plan. What the Project 2025 report set out in over 900 turgid pages, Musk’s remark captures in a simple pithy mantra for the social media age.
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If empathy is the weakness to my species, I’m glad we’re committing suicide by capitalist made climate change.
Without empathy, we have no redeeming characteristics and nothing of value will be lost.
Yes, the one thing that has kept our species’ societies (sometimes barely) working for millennia is the bug, just because you’re incapable of it, you goddamn ghoul.
Just linked this in the comment I left as well. Perfect timing on this comic!
“I’m a sociopath.” - Elon Musk
Huh…an admitted psychopath
Greed is a weakness. Empathy is a strength.
Fuck Joe Rogan for letting him say shit like that unchecked.
I mean, who’s surprised ? Joe Rogan isn’t even a yes man. Dude appears to be physically incapable of exercising critical thinking.
It’s likely due to all the DMT, weed, supplements, and head trauma he’s had over his career. Rogan has been bashed around like an old soccer ball in a LatAm favela, and his pivot to ‘PodcastBro Extraordinare’ came with so much drug use, it makes your local pharmacy blush.
Fuck Joe Rogan, period.
Money… He knows this shit is evil, and he’s okay with that.
I would recommend reading the quote in context, and not just headlines. It is not quite as insane as it seems at first glance, although just slightly. Transcript from Yahoo Fact Check:
Musk: 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, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
Rogan: Right, understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.
Musk: Yes, like, it’s weaponized empathy is the issue.
The point, as I understand it, is that empathy lets people manipulate you into making short-sighted decisions based purely on feelings, without properly investigating the facts. This is true. However, I strongly disagree that this is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization. I think that greed and selfishness are way bigger problems, and this is also what leads to people taking advantage of people’s empathy.
The part you linked was very interesting. It started to make more sense in his context, but then I went to go look at what he was actually referring to.
I feel that made it just as bad as the original out of context bit though.
He was referring to a phrase coined by one of his buddies, suicidal empathy, which sounds like it equates helping people to when someone tries to rescue a drowning person and is then drown themselves. It doesn’t seem to narrow the focus very much, and is more of the same BS that being “woke” is ruining the world. Here’s his friend in his own words:
The following essay by Dr. Gad Saad, an outspoken public intellectual and trailblazer in applying evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior, appeared on the cover of the January 2025 edition of When Free to Choose.
This is my 31st year as a professor. Being an academic is inscribed in my DNA. To be able to create and disseminate new knowledge is the most noble of all pursuits. To properly do so, though, requires that truth and freedom be defended as inviolable deontological ideals. Otherwise, if one is constrained in what they can study or communicate, then academia ceases to be about truth.
In my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, I argued that in the same way that organisms (including humans) could be parasitized by physical brain worms that detrimentally alter the hosts’ behaviors to serve the neuro-parasites’ interests, human beings could be infected by another class of devastating ideological neuro-parasites. I called these idea pathogens, and they include but are not limited to postmodernism, social constructivism, radical feminism, and cultural relativism, all of which stem from the academic ecosystem. It takes haughty professors, fully decoupled from reality within the walls of their ivory tower, to come up with some of the most imbecilic ideas imaginable. I then explain how these ideas came to be, and I offer a global mind vaccine to inoculate us against such departures from reason and common sense. In the 21st century, it should not be a debatable issue whether men can bear children or have menstrual cycles, but once a mind is infected with a mélange of these idea pathogens, all epistemological bets are off!
The Parasitic Mind addressed what happens to our cognitive system when it is hijacked by ideological rapture. My forthcoming book Suicidal Empathy further examines the descent to madness by highlighting the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets. This is how the rights of a minuscule minority of trans women (i.e., biological males) trample the rights of actual women in athletic competitions. It is how illegal migrants end up receiving greater U.S. aid than American veterans or American victims of natural disasters. Evolution has endowed our emotional and cognitive systems with the capacity to deploy our resources strategically. This is why parents are willing to jump in front of a bus to save their biological children but are less likely to sacrifice their lives to save a random child across the globe. It does not make them callous but Darwinian beings capable of cost-benefit tradeoffs rooted in universal features of our human nature.
The victory of Donald Trump on November 5, 2024, is an unequivocal repudiation of the ideological parasites that have wreaked havoc on our societies. However, it is crucial that we refrain from becoming complacent. This is no time to rest on our laurels. It took many decades of assiduous indoctrination for these parasitic ideas to flourish in every nook and cranny of our institutions. For us to fully flourish within an ethos of freedom will require that each of us contribute to the battle of ideas. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has the potential to affect change. Trump’s victory showed us that the silent majority abhors all of the progressive woke nonsense. People wish to live dignified lives rooted in the principles that made America great, namely personal agency, individual dignity, and meritocracy. With that in mind, I cannot express the extent to which I feel fortunate to be serving as a Visiting Professor and Global Ambassador at Northwood University. If all universities exemplified the spirit of The Northwood Idea, academia would be in much better shape. Truth and freedom shall always prevail.
I feel this is a dangerous way of spreading hateful ideology. It frames it as a common sense argument, but it is based on falsehood. Where are the “victims of wokeness” and are the examples really victims, or people that just didn’t get away with what they wanted to get away with? It is the same anti-migrant, anti-trans BS in better wrapping.
Not only him, Goliath…
Ohh now it all makes sense.
Dude got bullied, felt miserable and couldn’t deal with that. So he convinced himself to try and not feel feelings. Spoiler: doesn’t work and often ends in drug addiction.
Basically he has mommy daddy issues and wants to take it out on millions of other people. It’s like punching someone in the face but then washing their car and acting like he’s a saint.
But greed isn’t weakness?
You know who else thought empathy was a weakness? That German party from the 1930s that turned out to be really bad for the world…
Believing empathy is a weakness is a symptom of psychopathy.
The lack of empathy, however, has been linked to psychopathy by study after study after study.
Yep. They can’t even comprehend the notion.
yes, the problem with having an ignorant idiot of a host/presenter have all these hugely influential people with their half baked ideas as guests is that he can’t/won’t point out basic facts like how a lack of empathy is indicative of anti-social personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.
so, you’ve got how many bros who think “empathy is a bug” is a statement that doesn’t need to be challenged out there… repeating it in their heads.
Roegan just lets them talk, its a forum for everybody!
That’s because he’s not the brightest guy tbh
Wasn’t it the other way around? Psychopathy is the inability to empathy.
No, as a lack of empathy isn’t the only defining characteristic of psychopathy. There is also a lack of remorse, disinhibition, and egocentrism amongst other traits.
A lack of empathy alone doesn’t make someone a psychopath. For example some people on the autistic spectrum can exhibit a lack of empathy but are not psychopaths. (Should be noted a lack of empathy is not a defining feature of autism - its variable and a lot of people on the autistic spectrum do have empathy).
So its true to say a lack of empathy is a feature of psychopathy but not true to say that psychopathy is the inability to be empathetic.
Are there empathy possessing psychopaths?
No, I think another way to say it is that lack of empathy is a necessary, but not sufficient, criterion for it.
Cognitive empathy, yes, absolutely, affective empathy, no. Difference between flinching when someone gets hurt and understanding that someone gets hurt, including the theory of mind to understand that they don’t like that. Which is why the well-adjusted ones (mostly a function of nurture) make damn good surgeons. Maladapted ones will use that (very acute) cognitive empathy to do the usual dark triad stuff.
He’s really leaning into the villain trope. So many sci-fi villains claim that empathy and/or compassion are weaknesses. Their lack of it is usually their undoing.
