“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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From a fascists pov it is. But only from a fascists point of view.
from a psychopath’s point of view, really….
they like to tell themselves it’s a sort of superpower….
a narcissist kind of thing….
like when Ted Bundy was defending himself in trial for murdering a 12 year old girl, he kept asking the police to describe the crime scene, and thought that showing no emotion would prove he didn’t do it…
So when he crashes and burns, or dies of a drug overdose, I’m not supposed to care?
Cool. I think I can manage that.
I get saying it’s wrong what he said (you would be right) but imo it’s kinda missing the point. The most important thing to see imo is it’s extremely pathetic. This is the same mf faking Path of Exile and diablo accounts so he can seem cool (he kept saying he was a top player so he would get kudos from the gaming community).
This man is probably the most thin skinned idiot I’ve ever seen. So it must be extremely convenient for him to see himself as the bad guy with no empathy whose cold rational calculation leads to emotionless decisions or whatever huge cope he tells himself every day. The reality is he’s got more money than God and is running the current US administration and yet is still so mentally weak he is posting on Twitter hundreds of times per day about how he’s being persecuted and actually arguing in the comment sections
Like… Durh he believes this. He lived this and won pretty handily by never giving a shit about anyone. Now he’s the richest and most powerful person alive, so obviously he’s onto something! All this money can’t be wrong!
#shitsociopathssay
Just linked this in the comment I left as well. Perfect timing on this comic!
“I’m a sociopath.” - Elon Musk
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.
I really like the tarot card for strength:
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.
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.
Highly unlikely that DMT and weed reduced his capacity for empathy.
More likely the mainlining of $$$ and value system that says cash supercedes all else.
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.
No, that’s bullshit.
As a pretense: You have boundaries and you understand that others have agency.
If someone tries to guilt you into doing something, you enforce your boundaries. If you feel someone you know is being forced into doing something, you make your case and you back the fuck off. Their agency guides the choices they make, up to and including making choices that you, yourself, would not make.
Claiming that civilization is being manipulated by ‘weaponized empathy’ is horse shit designed to dismiss the agency of the people who made choices to help others. It’s sociopathy wrapped up in reasonable enough sounding psychobabble.
Musk is a sociopath so convinced of his own greatness and so desperate for a tax cut that he’s willing to let people starve and say it’s because he knows better.
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.
‘Ideological neo parasite’ is just another way of saying thought crime which is pretty funny coming from Mr ‘ethos of freedom’.
My issue is the framing of those who disagree with the opposing in-group as sub-human or a disease. It sounds a lot like Agent Smith in the first Matrix wanting to get rid of the last of humanity so the tech can run rampant.
I have yet to hear an “anti-woke” argument that amounts to anything other than “I think I’m superior and I need society to reflect that.”
The argument of caring for others can lead you to getting screwed over happens. I’ve gone out of my way for people who have not returned the favor, lent people money they never repaid, or had people try to get one over on me for no reason. I’m sure we all have. But if the way to avoid that is to have every relationship be transactional, I’m not interested. To say society is literally in danger by people caring to much is such a sociopathic idea.
Up until recent events, I felt it was rare to see anyone of a progressive nature calling for things like extrajudicial violence, or any kind of differential treatment of those that disagreed with them. Most of us just want to see right wingers act like decent human beings. But the alt-right types have never once stopped calling for segregation, discrimination, and immediate violence or removal of people they disagree with. We’re an unrepairable threat to them.
Musk and Saad can dress up what they’re saying in better language than Trump and your common red hatter, but it’s the same message. It’s anti-intellectualism and hate dressed up in fancy clothes. Treating people equally and with respect is not something to look down on, even if you don’t come out ahead every time. “Winning” isn’t the goal, equality is. People that treat humanity as a zero sum game are the ones with the problem, not the rest of us.
Not only him, Goliath…
