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.
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.
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.