Elon Musk and empathy: when sorry gives lust

s are a problem, especially if you don’t find an end and at least one of the two interlocutors are suspected anyway, in the polarity between genius and madness for some time now more generously to be awaited. In Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk said that the West has too much empathy.

The outcry in the good circles for this sentence was predictable. Only a very bad person could have something against empathy. Empathy, or compassion, is a crucial cornerstone of civilizational coexistence that Musk presumably does not master anyway.

In fact, it is worth taking a closer look. With the destructive empathy, Musk means less the personal – that is, that from person to person – as rather a social. The empathy that Angela Merkel spent on refugees in 2015 would be presumably exactly the horror that he has in mind and in his eyes all drives us into the apocalypse.

Elon allegedly has fourteen children – the reason why he was witing them was primarily afraid of the extinction of the Americans. Elon wants to go to Mars – less from a thirst for adventure than for fear of the end of the world. He is not alone in this: many tech billionaires see themselves in private bunkers and on other planets to get themselves to safety with money. They think they could escape on a day X of the earth that they have destroyed by withdrawing to an absolutely safe place. So we have to imagine Elon Musk as a rather disturbed, deeply scared person who fought manically against this fear by trying to accumulate money, power and importance.

That does not excuse anything, but explains a lot, also with regard to his idea of ​​empathy. It is dangerous because it escaped rational control, otherwise the musk submits his life. Empathy is emotional, radically subjective and can tempt you to go beyond your own limits because you let yourself be carried away by the situation in which another person is located. This fear is as comprehensible as it is unfounded: In her very readable book, sociologist Eva Illouz precisely traces that people earlier and today turn to their own group and devalue foreign groups and their members while they upgrade themselves. The limitless empathy for the stranger, which according to Musk brings the West to the edge of the civilization collapse, is as unlikely as absolute security according to the apocalypse on a distant planet.

In addition, empathy is not the unconditionally good and therefore dangerous than the Elon Musk would like to mark it. In everyday life, we rarely differentiate between pity and compassion linguistically. The former, the pity, is a kind of sympathy plus contempt. The one who fits stands in a higher position and makes the suffering small. Friedrich Nietzsche assumed that suffering does not relieve the suffering, but doubles, because it is of the weakness instead of appealing to human strength. Compassion, on the other hand, keeps eye level. You feel with you as far as you can, and if the painful experience of the other is evading your own traceability, you don’t have to hypocrisy emotionality that would only be lying. One could say: Heuchler feel sorry for honest people.

A clear example of misguided empathy is drone parents who monitor their children to take through as a GSG 9 mission command at the right moment. They are mini-elon muses. She also drives less love than the deep fear of the failure of her children, which is why they rely on the ideal conditions for maximum performance. However, they primarily secure the continued existence of the professional group of psychotherapists, who at some point have to treat these children because of an anxiety disorder.

The decisive error of the blind defenders of empathy is as follows: there is also sadistic empathy. What is meant are people who enjoy the pain of other people whose sensation of pleasure only begins in some cases when another person suffers pain. For a long time, the sadist was considered in psychology as an empathetic, cold, dull being. Today it is known that manipulative characters in particular can empathize very strongly into their victims in order to be able to influence them all the more successfully.

After how Elon Musk was dealt with at Doge, the authority for government efficiency, with state officials and previously also with Twitter employees, after taking over the house, it can be strongly assumed that he is a highly empathetic person-at the latest the moment he sees the pain and suffering of which he has destroyed with such great furor.