What I wonder is how much of that is innate versus learned.
Because it has been an increasing talking point among the right wing and evangelical churches that empathy is bad. And… a lot of that boils down to not having any.
It’s like the golden rule simply means as long as we each treat each other shitty we’re good. There needs to be another qualifier, and empathy, or kindness, or something else also needs to be attached. But, look who’s their leader! Clean. Your. House.
There is the Platinum Rule, which is to treat others how they would want to be treated. I’ve heard more references to it in the past few years than I have to the Golden Rule, so I take that as a good sign.
The silver rule is good too. “What you don’t want done to you, don’t do to others.”
Look at John Fetterman. He had a stroke, now he’s conservative, callous, etc. so, I’d bet it’s both nature and nurture, but the uneducated and religious are more likely to be conservative than liberal.
it has been an increasing talking point among the right wing and evangelical churches that empathy is bad
While I’m inclined to believe this, my attempt to add a source came up mostly empty, other than an amusing chapter of CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.
This was new to me so I tried looking it up as well. I found a lot of results right away with startpage, which makes me wonder what search engine you were using?
They (the evangelicals) are apparently calling it “toxic empathy” and they jump through a lot of loops to claim that it’s bad to have empathy with the victims of USA republican policies.
My first result was a long opinion piece criticizing evangelicals for their newfound crusade against empathy: https://churchleaders.com/news/511911-the-scandal-of-evangelical-empathy.html/4
2nd result is an evangelical that does a bit of mind bending to explain why empathy with outgroups is “toxic”: https://unityinchristianity.com/2025/02/03/the-truth-about-toxic-empathy-and-why-its-becoming-a-controversial-topic/.
The 3rd article has a claim that Jesus Himself was not empathic: “Clearly the Lord Jesus Christ can be sympathetic, but He cannot be empathetic in the sense of identifying with our sinful emotions and desires.” https://www.e-n.org.uk/features/2025-03-the-problem-with-empathy/ That article also references a book by an evangelical called “the sin of empathy”.
Modern USA could be summed up by the old Russian adage: “And then, somehow, it got worse.”
This is. … something ?! I’m flabbergasted. Thank you, wish I could give you more than one upvote!
“…identifying with our sinful emotions and desires” Don’t they also say that’s why he was fucking sent to Earth in the first place?
And the US evangelical team has won the gold in mental gymnastics once again.
Thanks. I was using Duck Duck Go for the terms “Evangelical” and “Empathy”, and found only pro-empathy articles on tht first page of results (other than the Screwtape Letters chapter).
I was at a cocktail party with people who mostly I have known for at least 15 years. This guy came up who is the husband of a good friend of my wife and he was talking about how he doesn’t believe in empathy anymore.
There’s definitely something in the water
Have you ever seen the culture in USA? Literally both “parties” are genocidal. It’s not learned so much as indoctrinated from birth. Not to mention the racism, patriarchy, etc.
Another study that proves water is wet
And that fire is hot
Today on balanced news we ask the question: is fire hot? We will listen to one expert who declares most dumpster fires don’t exist.
i was 🤯 when i found out most of them are metaphorical
No shit, Sherlock.
Don’t forget pedophilia
They love kids, even the ones who aren’t pedophiles still sexualize children all the time and are constantly thinking about how we must “protect the children”
who aren’t pedophiles
yea right
Hey! Enablers aren’t always offenders themselves. … still guilty of terrible shit just like a murder accomplice IMO, but there is a difference.
You needed to conduct official research to figure that one out?
I’m up in Canada in northern Ontario and I have a few friends (on very thin ground mind you), relatives and associates who support or agree with Trump or MAGA … and all of them are racist, show signs of psychopathy, are manipulative, are callous and are narcissists.
9/10 if I meet a total ignorant jerk, they’ll be a MAGA idiot
I needed the laugh, thanks
I would imagine it’s an even wider scope than that… People who vote for bigoted, ignorant candidates are themselves bigoted and ignorant.
“LOOK AT THEM! THEY’RE JUST LIKE ME!”
(Votes)
Explains Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, John Kennedy, etc. etc.
“This paper was several years in the making, starting as a result of the 2016 election, and was designed to address why some people might view favorably a political figure with a history of business failures, bankruptcies, misogynistic statements caught on video, use of charity money for a self-portrait, etc,” explained study author Craig Neumann, a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas.
To investigate these links, the researchers conducted two large surveys with a total of over 9,000 participants from the United States. The first sample consisted of 1,000 men recruited online, about one-third of whom were racial or ethnic minorities. The second sample included 8,047 men and women who completed personality questionnaires on a public psychology website.
Participants in both samples completed a range of validated questionnaires measuring political attitudes, personality traits, and empathy. Political ideology was assessed through questions about general political orientation, preferences for military versus social spending, support for gun control, and evaluations of Trump’s first term as president. The researchers used structural equation modeling, a statistical technique that allows for the testing of relationships between multiple variables at once, while accounting for measurement errors.
Science confirming what we already know lol
As it should. Just because we think we know something doesn’t mean we shouldn’t measure it.
There is a book that gave a scientific explanation and it was written fifty years ago.
“Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler. Toffler was a sociologist. He studied what happened in the past when there were radical changes in society. The first great wave was the switch from hunter/gatherer tribes to farming towns. 5,000 years later there was a leap from farming to industry. Both times there were people who couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt themselves to the new order.
‘Future shock’ was his name for the madness of people who would do anything to hold on to a past that was already dead.
Toffler was spot on with his theory, and his follow-up “The Third Wave” is equally relevent to what we’re seeing with digital acceleration causing massive societal upheval.
His book “War And Anti-War” came out around 1996.
He predicted that the next American war would be against a non-state, maybe the cartels or a terrorist group.
Interesting article on the subject: https://mgorbis.medium.com/the-future-as-a-way-of-life-4bc314ec97de
You want a major mind fuck?
“Stand On Zanzibar” by John Brunner. Brunner’s novel won the 1969 Hugo for Best Science Fiction Novel. It is set in the early 21st Century. The author based his predictions on Toffler’s work. He imagined things like Detroit being a ghost town; legalized pot; the internet; AI ; well paid adults needing roommates and a lot of other things. He got enough right to be very scary indeed.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/stand-on-zanzibar-john-brunner/7252770?ean=9781250781222&next=t
The weirdest thing about MAGA psychopathy is that Trump is in the Epstein files.
Yet another groundbreaking story from the pages of the medical journal “DUH”.
You can just say nazis.
it just baffled me how many of them there are. It kind of feels like at this point it’s human nature honestly.
just as frustrating are all the people in the “middle” who are more ambivalent about trump but still voted for him because of egg prices.
It’s just been made acceptable and even praised.
So everyone inclined is following suit.
It’s not “human nature” or any other psuedo-science. It’s the unsurprisingly result of an extremely fascist society. Literally founded on genocide and slavery. Both “parties” openly support genocide right now. This is what USA has always been.
