Not that the vast majority would be without empathy, just that power would raise it from where it sits currently. Thought I should clarify that.
Gotta build a world where compassion and empathy are rewarded and that will happen
You don’t get to positions of power by being nice. You’re either corrupt to begin with or you will become corrupt on the journey. It’s like any other competitive situation without proper refs and rules. People without morals do things to “win” that people with morals wouldn’t. This is why the shit floats to the top
Oh my god are you THE reanukeeves? Who was in ‘mhe tatrix’? Holy shit dude I love your work, but why did you shave your facial hair when you started getting old?
Don’t forget my roles in “Wohn Jick”, “Boint Preak” and “Till and Bed”. I actually don’t shave, it’s due to the testosterone blockers I’ve been taking because I feel that I am too manly and am setting an unrealistic goal for humanity.
That’s reasonable. Yes.
It would but unfortunately we have built a world where our systemic structures incentivize abandoning empathy and solidarity in order to get ahead of “the competition” (i.e. your fellow man)
Bad people always will exist to some extent, those people are irrelevant. The major problem is that we have a society that turns good people bad in order to survive.
Between a third and a half of the world’s wealth comes from inheritance. If your parents have savings you will likely become privileged when they die. You’ll experience some small windfall, and may even move up a class. Will you keep your empathy and class politics? What will you do with the money? Or will you just hide and perpetuate the system?
We are organised in such a way that authority and empathy exclude each other. Never forget that authority is an authority by collective agreement, even when enforced by violence. A king never rules alone. If you elevate basic morality as a prerequisite for your participation with said authority it has no choice but to do so. So reach out to people and have important talks about these things. It is very important that agreement is formed as broadly as possible.
I think our inverse relationship between power and empathy is essentially a society-wide maladaptive response to trauma.
It is beneficial to a society in times of famine, war, and general disaster, to have a leader who is able to say that 12 year olds should be fed before 14 year olds. It is also beneficial to a society in those times for the majority of people to be more willing to do something if an authority figure tells them to than they are willing to decide to do something.
When a society is generally secure, this becomes hugely problematic, because some portion of us are predisposed to be both heartless and powerful (the causation is largely irrelevant, because there’s a definite correlation), and most of the rest of us will support them and carry out their wishes.
Highly recommend reading David Graeber’s “Dawn of Everything”, “Debt: the First 5000 Years”, and “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”. It explains a lot about how humanity ended up this way.
And the causation between people being heartlessness and power of authority is incredibly important: the way we build society creates the incentive structure of how we behave within that society. We have created a society that rewards abandoning empathy and solidarity to gain power and authority (i.e. security and stability) Thus we have a society of people who have no empathy or solidarity.
I love David graeber, that’s always a good recommendation.
I think that causation would be important for dealing with the issue, but I also believe there is zero practical chance we do deal with it, so it’s realistically irrelevant. We’re in a self-reinforcing cycle and it’s not changing unless we actually change it. Only in the last few years, I’ve seen us hit a dozen of what would have seemed like breaking points in the nineties, and we’re not breaking.
I think it does, except for the kind of person who seeks and covets that power, they’re already damaged goods.
