Elon Musk’s Comment on Empathy Is Much Worse Than You Thought

The short version of Elon Musk’s comment about empathy, from his interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, has been going around, like this: “empathy is ‘the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.'” That’s both misleading and inadequate given the context.

In their discussion, they are complaining about voter ID laws and illegal immigrants voting, and Rogan says “if you’re gonna do that, it’s over,” to which Musk replies, “Exactly. There’s no coming back from that.” A moment later Musk escalates it with the interjection, “civilizational suicide.” (This passage starts here on YouTube; there is a transcript here.) Here is the exchange, then I’ll explain:

Rogan: Yeah. Right to the rocks. Bang, crash the boat.
Musk: I mean, there’s a guy who posts on X who’s great: Gad Saad.*
Rogan: Yeah. He’s a friend of mine. He’s been on the podcast a bunch of times.
Musk: Yeah, he’s awesome. … And he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, if there’s, like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also, don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
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, and I think 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. Yeah, weaponized empathy.

Nazi eugenics

What does this mean? It’s wrong to say that Musk simply thinks empathy is bad, or a weakness. He says it’s good to care about people. The problem for him is that people care about individuals. And this is Nazism.

Before the genocidal mass murder in concentration camps, the Nazis had eugenics — borrowed from the United States and other countries, but taken to a much more extreme level, with hundreds of thousands of involuntary sterilizations, and then targeted killings, especially of children with disabilities. This is described by Thomas Childers in The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (2017), who details the ideological campaign leading up to eugenics and then genocide.

The main ideological hurdle, which Musk is confronting in this passage, is to get people to elevate their moral thinking beyond the individual to the community, the Volk, or — as Musk puts it — the civilization. People had to be trained to overcome their “false humanity,” “exaggerated pity,” and “soft-headed humanism.” For the greater good.

Here is the relevant excerpt (from Chapter 11):

The ultimate goal of this intense indoctrination was to condition Germans to think racially, to view the world through a biological lens, and to infuse German society with a new racial ethos. Germans were constantly reminded that they were no longer merely Germans; they were Aryans, and their first duty was to the Volk, defined in racial terms. Doctors, too, needed to adjust their priorities. They were no longer tending to the individual but to the Volk. There was no higher moral obligation. 

In this new biological society there could be no outmoded sympathy for the weak or for the racially inferior. Feelings of “false humanity,” “exaggerated pity,” and brotherly love were no longer operable values… With stunning callousness, the Nazis produced photographs of desperately disabled children juxtaposed with rosy-cheeked healthy children, accompanied by charts that purported to document the exorbitant costs of maintaining the unfit. These illustrated charts appeared in newspapers, journals, and as posters, ostensibly documenting the drain posed by the disabled on the economy and reminding taxpayers that they were footing the bill for this false “humanitarianism”—and that in a stressful time of economic recovery. 

As one poster frankly stated, “The genetically ill damage the community. The healthy preserve the Volk.” To coordinate and unify all schooling and propaganda in the areas of population and racial matters, the Nazis created the Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) in May 1934. 

… 

In one three-month period in 1938, it sponsored 1,106 public meetings attended by 173,870 people and held 5,172 school functions in which a total of 330,972 pupils participated. It organized thousands of week-long retreats and seminars for party members; it produced 350 films whose explicit message was to belittle the “soft-headed humanism” of those who harbored moral reservations about sterilization, a message also carried in its glossy illustrated journal, New People. By 1939 it was staffed by 3,600 workers.

Musk uses “weaponized empathy” to mean “false humanity” — the humanistic impulse to care about individuals over protecting civilization from lesser people. Civilizational empathy is a higher moral calling than instinctive individual empathy, which must be subordinated. Calling the “empathy response” a bug of Western civilization is rejecting the Enlightenment elevation of individual rights as a governing principle. Humans have a natural impulse to care, which is good, he says. The problem is turning that impulse toward the individual — that’s where the Enlightenment went wrong, building into its politics and law an ideological barrier to civilizational improvement.

Of course individualism is problematic, and the protection of individual rights, to include property, in the context of extreme inequality is, let’s just say, a source of tension in modern society. But the problem isn’t the concept of individual rights, the problem is the rank ordering of rights to be protected (if you protect the right to amass extreme wealth, you can’t protect access to healthcare).

If you just see the quote and think Musk is an asshole who doesn’t care about people, that’s true but it’s not the point. The point is he has a clear understanding of the eugenic mission, and the ideological building blocks to its realization. It’s Nazism.

In related news, the Musk-funded pronatalism / eugenics organization at the University of Texas Austin is holding its next conference this month. This conference includes White supremacist eugenicists and should absolutely not be hosted by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas state government, which it will be. As the Guardian reports, the registration website says you have to register to find out where it is, but the homepage says there will be speakers at UT Austin’s conference center, and dinner at the state-run Bullock Museum. Speakers are scheduled to include “Cremieux” (Jordan Lasker, one of Musk’s favorite Nazis), and “Raw Egg Nationalist” (Charles Cornish-Dale); as well as other fundamentalist religious activists such as Lyman Stone; and Geoffrey Miller, the psychology professor who didn’t quite get fired for a fat-shaming tweet in 2013. Anyway, it’s disgraceful and shows what terrible university administrators will do for Elon bucks.

* Gad Saad (the transcript misspells his name as Godside), is a popular MAGA-ized marketing professor who uses evolutionary psychology for evil ends.