-Elon Musk, March 6, 2025The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.
-Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trialsIn my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.