Why has "empathy" become a swear word (one of a growing number of swear words) in rightard circles?
The ability experience pathy is what seperates human beings from snakes. The scientific classification for someone who doesn't feel empathy is a sociopath, and the general consensus until a few months ago was that being a sociopath is a bad thing. But now you see rightards proudly proclaiming that they don't care about anything or anyone but themselves, and it's fucking bizarre to me.
>The ability experience pathy is what seperates human beings from snakes. The scientific classification for someone who doesn't feel empathy is a sociopath, and the general consensus until a few months ago was that being a sociopath is a bad thing. But now you see rightards proudly proclaiming that they don't care about anything or anyone but themselves, and it's fucking bizarre to me.
Alright what I'm gonna say is a bit controversial, but I think at least part of it is he liberal weaponization of empathy, an an unspoken narrative that's developed in which "You can either have trans rights or economic prosperity." I know that sounds stupid, let me try to explain it as best as I can.
So polls taken place after the election asked voters, IIRC, to describe "what the democratic party is about" and it boiled down to some variation of "trans rights" in the sense of "Dems only care about trans people", you've got that one election ad that Trump ran where it was all "Kamala cares for they/them, Trump cares for you" or what have you. Of course, this isn't limited to just trans issues, that's just the most predominant of them. You had Hillary Clinton in 2016 attacking Bernie Sanders with "Would regulating the banks END RACISM?!?!"
The Modus Operandi, mostly pioneered by neoliberals for years, has been to suppress the Left or economically populist factions by making appeals to empathy. I think this is why we have an assumed divide between neoliberalism and neoconservatism (with the latter being mostly ignored nowadays and the former absorbing the latter) because the neocons would bang the drums of war and appeal to national pride or security while neolibs would, I dunno, wave a pride flag in front of the bombed out ruins of Gaza. And people, especially on the right, have been getting sick of it. They're feeling the sting of declining economic opportunities on a personal level, and they're desperate to undo it, but the far-right offers them false hope and the neolibs put up a weak defense of "Well we can't do that, 'cause that would be mean!"
Think about that quote from Lenin, "You can't make a revolution wearing white gloves". Well, The Right is thinking in a similar manner. Rightists are convinced "if we JUST deport all these goddamn illegals, the labor market will get tighter, more Americans will get jobs, and housing will be more affordable!" It's unlikely to work, but the liberal response is to show pictures of undocumented people being brutalized and say "will you admit this is wrong?!" Well, the Right's decided that it's worth it. A kind of "I'm not gonna let myself get held back by a bunch of crying illegals" decision. The Nazis emphasized a similar kind of thinking: "We're gonna do bad things, but if we just harden our hearts and do what needs to be done, we'll fix everything wrong in our lives and come out stronger than before." It's a kind of Faustian thinking, trade your soul for power in the material world.
Of course the problem is that Faustian bargains are a fundamentally false dichotomy. You don't need some psychotic fascist death squad to improve things. You aren't forced to pick between having a home or being anti-racist. But neoliberals have completely muzzled the Left in national dialogue, so to many people now it's a choice between "doing what has to be done" or continuing the slide into poverty and despair because you don't want to stain your hands. The Left has been playing defense for years, trying to keep the lid on a pressure cooker, all the while things are getting worse and the Right is on the offense with some promise that "things can get better if we just do a little ethnic cleansing". And to be frank, it IS infuriating that every time there's some attempt at positive change in this country, the neoliberals will throw up some pitiable group as a shield.
<Oppose Israel?
>"LOOK AT THIS HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR! SHE'S SCARED! YOU'RE MAKING HER SCARED RIGHT NOW! SHE'S CRYING YOU BASTARD!"
<Want to regulate the banks?
>"For hundreds of years THE WHITE MAN has kept women, black, and brown people down. Now that companies are moving to become more diverse you want to shut their doors? You should be ASHAMED of yourself!"
<Support withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq.
>"This is the Afghan Girls' Soccer Team, they were closed down and married off to 60 year old Taliban fighters because YOU wanted us to leave these people unprotected! You should feel DISGUSTED with yourself!"
Eventually you get so sick and tired of neolibs claiming the "moral high ground" that you just say: "Fuck it, fine. I'm evil. Can I get some fucking healthcare please?"
>>2347574>Why has "empathy" become a swear word (one of a growing number of swear words) in rightard circles?i've never heard of this, are you manufacturing outrage again anon?
>the general consensus until a few months ago was that being a sociopath is a bad thingi don't believe thats true, actually. i think you just made that up.
>>2347680Not really. Empathy is about understanding other people's emotions and beliefs, not endorsing them. Honestly, I think you
need to be empathetic to be a good Marxist, because so much of Marxism is about understanding how one's place in social relations causes them to act as they do.
>>2347742It's not super super common, but I've seen it enough times without actively seeking it out to know that it's the flavor of the month within rightard circles. A lot of it seems to be profilicity, denouncing the signifier of empathy rather than the signified.
>>2347922Fair enough.
I myself might have a weird perspective on the subject because I'm autistic. I'm emotionally empathetic
enough that I like being kind to people, but at the same time, I've always gotten the impression that empathy as I understand it is more cognitive than it is emotional. I was very much into egoism when I was a teenager, for example.
>>2347574But that's, ironically a misunderstanding of how those rightoids feel about "empathy". It is a social thing what shapes one's understanding of others and their own internal state. There is no baseline, no human nature besides some very basic instincts like protecting and recognizing progeny and so on, and all of that can still be overridden.
But it's not the skill of Empathy that rightoids protest. The main way in which people are told about empathy is through the medicalization of "antisocial behavior" into a nebulous disorder of "sociopathy" and related terms. Suggesting that a lack of compliance with societal expectations is a mental defect that prevents one's behavior from being correctly oriented by "empathy". That is, a shared handicap that is supposed to safeguard against the worst antisocial behaviors. And which one is supposed to pretend comes from "human nature" or whatever psychologists are calling it now.
Rightoids, being edgier liberals, see the problem in handicapping oneself. It's not like anyone really abides by the moralist set of rules that would make you "antisocial". Using the right set of words, you could frame the normal activity of immiserating thousands of lives, by a business executive, a soldier, a bureaucrat… as perfectly abiding behavior that is not "antisocial". No matter how callous or how explicitly those reject to use their empathetic skills to orient their decisions. No sociopaths here.
But if you frame it wrong, say, admitting that one is surrounded by snakes who would do one the same and so one is going to ruthlessly climb over them at their expense in a career… Well buddy, you got yourself a lack of "empathy". Hence "empathy", in common parlance being just a matter of PR. An contradiction of liberal society that runs on radical individualism but overtly coats it in moralist PR. Learning empathy boils down to understanding that contradiction and being appropriately deceitful.
Although seemingly lots of people manage to adopt the contradiction itself and only instinctively be selfish without admitting to themselves they are.
>>2349167Oh no not the big man
I just talked to him yesterday, he seemed healthy, you know considering
>>2347574It should be a swear word in communist circles as well. Psychologizing is very convenient to the bourgeois and bourgeois intellectual since it's very easily used to dismiss real contradictions and real conflicts. Khruschev's secret speech is a great example and also relevant to actual socialist construction, or rather its derailment. It's no surprise that labor aristocrat "left" loooves it. The psychologizing HR lady is just the latest iteration of this liberal rot, communists had to suffer from this shit much longer than right-wingers.
The right-wingers OP spoke of are honestly more like Marxists than half the people who replied in this thread. You faggots bring up the book definition, but the way the word is used in practice is very different. To them, it's
>a weapon libtards use to attack people for not feeling the right feelings or some gay shit like thatbecause it is largely that today, hence all the "ayatollah is a mad tyrant", "Kim Jong Un is a mad tyrant", even "Lukashenko is a mad tyrant", you get the idea.
No, the reason why right-wingers are like this is not because they are the authoritarian unwholesome personality (i.e. they're just retarded basically), but rather real factors like downward mobility. The problem is that these real factors do include culture, so it can be difficult to tell where the death drive bullshit ends and where the reasonable "america was founded by religious fundamentalists who believed themselves to be the chosen people of the old testament, no shit they support israel" begins. The cutoff will probably have to be a practical one: the parts that can be tied to practice are acceptable, the ones that can't be will have to be ignored.
>>2350187I mean to contextualize the "God is Dead" thing, the statement (and Nietzsche's use of it) was more the existence of an "objective" morality was dead. It's easier to understand in the context of Nietzsche's day because you'd have terrific poets like Oscar Wilde who'd be considered "bad" because he was homosexual (and a bit of hedonistic pervert), but not just "bad" in the sense of personal opinion, bad in the sense of objective moral character. The "Death of God" is Nietzsche saying there isn't any morality that exists
outside of mankind. Ultimately morality is derived from social consensus but does not exist as an actual reality unto itself.
So you can still say things like "Theft is bad" but that's a personal/social value, and not one that has any tangible bearing outside your submission to that value set. Even then people make arbitrary adjustments to that idea: Stealing is bad BUT Robin Hood is a hero. Stealing is bad BUT it's a victimless crime to steal from corporations. Stealing is bad BUT you can steal bread to feed your family. So on and so forth.
Now to redirect the conversation back to empathy. Psychologists have conducted studies that show that it's a strong motive force for people who lean more "liberal" or "left" whereas conservatives value things like "loyalty" and "authority". And I think the issue is that these traits have diverged into separate political camps while a powerful political ideology needs to uphold
both values. Empathy and loyalty, willingness to rebel and willingness to obey, the ability to care and the ability to harm. Marxism-Leninism, though not wholly limited to MLism, would ultimately be the synthesis of these "liberal" and "conservative" traits into an ideology that could fight but also govern. Anarchists will bring up the Kronstadt rebellion or the crushing of Makhnovia as "crimes" of Bolshevism, the chief weapon wielded against historical socialism is lists of atrocities one after the other, but the reality is that elements of ruthlessness allowed the Bolsheviks (and later Communist Revolutionaries) to
win. There is not a single success to Anarchism, if we define success as the ability to take and hold territory for the duration of a war. Makhnovia failed, Kronstadt failed, Catalonia failed. They can point to maybe one glorious year in which they oversaw a society (in the midst of a war) but it was government driven by moral principles without the necessary ruthlessness that ultimately delivered them to their doom. It's like a ship that's one big party, where everyone is the captain and no rules exist, colliding with an iceberg and sinking to the ocean. They can say that for one brief week the ship sailed, but it was state socialism that made it into port.
Now this isn't to dog anarchists, but rather to say: there are ideals that are higher but which can't be pursued without some suspension of empathy. You shouldn't stop opposing Israel even if some old Holocaust Survivor is genuinely hurt by you doing so. You shouldn't support overthrowing Iran even if they're regressive on LGBT rights. Liberals in particular use selective empathy; crocodile tears for all the gays supposedly killed by Hamas in Gaza while not caring about the tens of thousands being slaughtered en masse by Israel. The end goal is good, but along the way there will sadly be just, honorable, and loving people who'd oppose you every step of the way for one reason or another. The point is having assurance in one's own ideals enough that you can overcome that, but the feelings of guilt or empathy aren't bad in and of itself.
Think of emotional empathy like any other emotion: fear, anger, joy, etc. Fear keeps us safe but you shouldn't over-indulge in it to the point it becomes the lone decision-maker in your life.
>>2351011>Ultimately morality is derived from social consensusWrong. Morality is derived from material condition but You preach idealistic notions of morality as mere abstract concensus. All moral theories have been the product, in the last analysis, of the economic stage which society had reached at that particular epoch.
>but does not exist as an actual reality unto itself. Wrong. You say morality is utterly subjective, denying its objective social function. If morality truly was what you say it is, then proletarian morality is no different from bourgeois morality.
>So you can still say things like "Theft is bad" but that's a personal/social value, and not one that has any tangible bearing outside your submission to that value set.Wrong. Morality is easily recognized in laws and their enforcement. Theft, rape, and murder being illegal has definite material bearing even on those who refuse to submit to that value set.
small soul neoliberal bugman ideology:
https://www.thenerdreich.com/silicon-valleys-scary-new-religion-tescreal/>>2347735>Alright what I'm gonna say is a bit controversial,<"as a degenerate US settler who is is aligned with my fellow settler degenerate Elon Musk, this seems very rational"Can you name a single socialist who has ever spoken to these undocumented slaves who are undeserving of empathy? Just one socialist, that's all I'm asking!
Funny how these PMC indoor kids pretend like they are any different than Zionists. I'm sure their counterparts in Israel are also writing 4chan posts about how they are smart and rational for being satanic reptilians
>>2351114Material conditions aren't totally separated from social consensus. The base and superstructure work in tandem, they aren't independent from one another.
>You say morality is utterly subjective, denying its objective social function.Again, morality doesn't exist independent of human societies. It's not "objective" in that sense.
>Morality is easily recognized in laws and their enforcement.If laws make morality than laws proposing executing women for being raped or throwing gays off buildings would be "moral" in the realm they exist in. Yes, laws have material bearing; if you get caught. But as we see with the ultra wealthy or people who get away with their crimes, laws aren't some spectral force that imposes a punishment after death, they're human constructs and can only be enforced by other humans. You kill someone on a desert island and there's no "material" or "objective" consequence for it.
>>2351515>"MUH SETTLERS" >>2347574Right-wing belief, when taken to its furthest extreme, is almost purely narcissistic. People mistakenly think the right is patriotic, but their patriotism is more of an outlet for deeply narcissistic expression. See: “Mishima”.
Right wingers you see do continually try to shrink the circle of people they have responsibility for until it’s so small it’s a single person, so small it crushes them out of existence.
They don’t want family. Their ideal is actually to be a man without a family. No women seen or heard, who they hate. Their children are perfect copies of themselves.
That they feel comfortable expressing their disdain for empathy or compassion is more to do with how in charge they feel of the culture. Not too different from their open racism.
>>2347735> "if we JUST deport all these goddamn illegals, the labor market will get tighter, more Americans will get jobs, and housing will be more affordable!" I actually think this is much closer to the Bernie Sanders style of anti-immigrant rhetoric. The right wing is actually directly racist. They talk about the issue in terms of culture and civilization, not labor. Really, we’ve known for decades that the job stealing rhetoric was a fig leaf for the then-unvoicable ideological position. This drift in language in response to a cultural shift on the tolerability of racism was noted at the time and is now named the Southern Strategy.
I think it’s important to recognize that this is a genuinely ideological position. It’s not something that comes out of (another hilariously obvious euphemism) economic anxiety.
>The ability experience pathy is what seperates human beings from snakes.Nonsense, the vast majority of animals experience empathy.
>>2347592No
I guess you could make the argument that invoking "having empathy" has become something of an emotional cliche amongst leftists and liberals in the absence of more substantive arguments. But on the other hand
>>2355918 articulates my thoughts on the reactionary crusade against "empathy" perfectly. As it stands right now most rightoids are basically in a competition to see who can dehumanize and turn themselves into sociopathic robots the most.
>>2355955There's good posts in this thread, and you're proving their points.
Sucks to be an empathy fan, and having to deal with people like you.
It's like being an anime fan and dealing with those anime fans that unironically watch loli vtubers
>>2349407>>2371612>In a climate like that, I wouldn’t be surprised by how fucking mad a reactionary can get over the term when the people using it are hypocrites when it comes to it and use it more often to gaslight others.My dad once gave my mom a black eye, would come home angry, punch holes in doors, throw shit, and occasionally hit us. Once told me when I was younger he could hit whoever he wanted when he wanted, and could even break my jaw if he wanted to.
He's also a "feminist" in the liberal sense. Bought the pink pussy hat during the women's march, complained about "ignorant white men" before, supports female content creators and unironically sat down and watched some "Dear white people" series on YouTube years ago.
I know it sounds absurd or like I'm making it up, but its real. I'm not fucking joking. Dude acted like an abusive husband in some Hallmark movie then goes around claiming he's a feminist. The "hypocrisy of empathy" is very real, y'know, the white suburbanite going all "Black Lives Matter" one moment but calling the cops on some "suspicious young men" the next. And I think a great deal of the communication breakdown between Right Wingers and the rest of us is, in part, because they perceive hypocrisies that the rest of us either don't notice or separate ourselves from. Sure, *we* think Nancy Pelosi is a liberal cunt, but to them we're "all on the same side" or whatever.
And to be frank, given my upbringing, I think I can at least comprehend reactionary anger a lot of the time. Like it or not, I imagine I'm standing with a single toe in their psyche. There's hatred, sure, but also a kind of perverse thrill within hypocrisy. When Trump contradicts himself in the span of a day, they enjoy it because, hey, now "the libs" are getting a "taste of their own medicine." It's kind of fallen out of fashion now, but I remember years ago there was a trope in right-wing circles of the "predator male feminist"; which is to say, some creep who'd make a big show about how much he "respects women" or "loves women" and then it turns out he raped or beat a woman. And you hate the guy, but you also lowkey enjoy him getting "taken down a peg" because you've got this image of him sneering "Well if you aren't a feminist you're a SEXIST" and then it turns out this guy preys on women and you, for however much you think "the patriarchy" is stupid, don't.
Shit, I'll admit, even I thought it was lowkey pretty funny when Neil Gaiman was accused of being a predator. You've got years and years of hearing "See, this is a GOOD MALE" "This is who men should look up to!" And it's this guy coded in some annoying British whimsy, going on and on about how "Oh, women are so STRONG and BRAVE", meanwhile he's doing awful shit that dudes who don't have the need to constantly repeat the mantra of "Women are strong, women are brave, women are great" just plain aren't.
So while I can understand the loathing for "weaponized empathy" as it were, I think there's also an element of sadistic glee at seeing it proven wrong. Which can be equally troubling.
>>2372909I see it, and love, as muscles that need to be worked out – other wise it becomes weak and never considered in your thinking.
You can probably guess the material conditions that make working it out challenging, (stacked with those that weaponized it).
>>2372852Would you consider the le empathetic feminist dad of cpusa anon a right winger?
>>2347574Basically because universal values don't really exist, even if it's in human nature (as far as we know) and helpful in the long term.
This is not to say that there can't be agreements betwixt opposing powers, or SOMETHING universal amoungest people, but that would, at least now, be limited to the very minimalistic sense of a nation require education to improve economic and ecological conditions with something like complex empathy being a byproduct of this, rather than being uniting itself
The same can be said for liberty, honor, diginity, culture, rationality, almost any human right.
This is why the actual left is so focused on permablitzing, gun ownership, and the natural sciences, as these are all relevant to material conditions, specifically, in becoming independent of the state, and later, making the state too expensive to run; the demsocs are, by contrast, gushing vaginal fluid over some liberal mayor in new york who happens to support some nationalization.
So you can autist an organization's or politicians history, waiting for the one great trailblazer, or you can accept the premise that anyone grazing the state will be completely hypocritical and incoherent, under a veneer of hyperreal opposition, as is the nature of politics. The latter doesn't mean empathy is any less important, but that the optics which empathy is sometimes used for is already broken and what's left is manipulation.
On a somewhat related note, permaculture seems to be much more easy than one would think, in terms of labor, energy and land, with it only taking 1/15th to 1/30th of an acre, and comparable to the US food industry as a whole, in terms of necessary labor time, so capitalism is on shaky ground anyway:
https://abundantpermaculture.com/10-steps-growing-food-less-10-hours-week/https://waldenlabs.com/how-to-grow-6000-lbs-of-food-on-110th-acre/https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/u-s-restaurant-employee-demographics/&ved=2ahUKEwinq8T48bGOAxVjEmIAHSfcNuoQFnoECFAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2U9i3h8yrRgUMyvdeILRqxhttps://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://josephpoore.com/Science%2520360%25206392%2520987%2520-%2520Accepted%2520Manuscript.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwimyK668rGOAxUQF2IAHY5BEMUQFnoECCkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3Stem6yPjHdkuH1wxskgzI Unique IPs: 47