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.
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.