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Oct. 6, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:41
2231 Essential Empathy, Sociopathy and Government Programs

What is missing from those who want to solve complex social problems with blunt government force.

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It's Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
This is essential empathy, something which I think really, really, really needs to be discussed.
And so I've waited, of course, until the early 2000s in podcast series to discuss it.
But empathy is a very powerful notion.
I think it's somewhat misunderstood.
And I think it is, of course, what needs to be developed the most for society to become free of the historical plagues of Hierarchical, collectivist, oligarchies, the state, the use of force to get things done, and so on.
So empathy, of course, fundamentally is putting yourself in the other person's shoes, having a sense of what it's like to be on the receiving end of what it is that you are doing.
And empathy is really the essence of morality, of course, right?
And it's different from sympathy, which I'll talk about in a sec, but You can't steal from someone if you experience their discomfort at having been stolen from, right?
So, I mean, if you've lost your wallet, you say, oh my god, I've lost my wallet.
What a pain in the neck.
And so, you can't go steal somebody else's wallet if you have a deep understanding or an emotional memory of what it's like to have your wallet taken from you or to lose your wallet.
You won't inflict that on someone else.
Obviously, you can't rape someone if you empathize with their Incredible, powerful desire to not be raped, and so on.
You can't torture someone if...
So, empathy is essential to morality.
If you don't have empathy, you can only fake morality, which actually makes you a lot more dangerous.
And empathy is different from sympathy, because sympathy is when you feel what the other person is feeling, and...
You have positive feelings towards the other person.
So, if somebody plans a surprise party for you that you like and makes you happy, then you feel good about that person's desire to make you happy and so on.
That's positive.
Someone's doing something positive for you and that evokes affection and all that.
On the other hand, if you're a woman walking down A street, they're walking down the street, it's late at night, and some mouth-breathing guy is slithering along behind you and slowly getting closer and so on, then you empathize and feel fear, right?
Because the person is lacking emotion, empathy towards you, right?
because anyone with half a brain knows that a woman walking down the street late at night does not want some guy coming up closer and closer to her, right?
He should cross the street, he should hang back, he should find another route, just so that she won't feel so alarmed.
And so the fact that he is doing something which will definitely make her scared and continuing to do it means that he does not have empathy.
Now, he may have non-empathy in a neutral kind of way, like in an Asperger's kind of way, like he just can't figure out what other people are feeling, but he's not sadistic or malicious.
But we don't really want to take that chance, right?
So a lack of empathy is necessary but not sufficient for cruelty.
Not everyone who lacks empathy is cruel, but everyone who is cruel lacks empathy.
And so you can empathize with somebody's lack of empathy, which is...
A sort of red flag signal for significant potential danger.
And that's having empathy, but that's not having sympathy for the person, right?
If somebody...
If somebody's child dies, you feel incredible empathy and sympathy for their loss.
If somebody kills their child, well, you don't feel that same empathy.
So if someone's wife leaves him and you feel sympathy and then you find out that he drank and beat her and slept around, you don't feel sympathy.
I mean, you can still empathize with the fact that he's having pain, but you won't feel sympathy because he brought it on himself.
And to feel sympathy in that situation, I would argue, is sort of unjust, right?
You can't have the same standards for those who act virtuously as those who don't.
Now, I've gone over a lot of this stuff before.
There is the development of mirror neurons in the brain, which arises from the scanning.
When you're born, and even before you're born, your entire body and all its contents are scanning the environment.
What kind of person do I need to be to succeed in this environment?
And there's really only two kinds of people that you can be to survive in an environment.
Good and evil.
Now, good is bad in a brutal environment.
And evil is bad in a good environment.
Evil is good for reproductive strategies in an evil environment.
And good is good in a good environment.
And so this basic triangulation your body needs to figure out.
So before you're born, if you're hungry, if there's screaming, if there's violence, if you're getting floods of cortisol from your mother's system and all of that, then your body says, oh, okay, so we're in a violent win-lose situation, so empathy is going to be negative for me.
It's going to be a huge problem.
I'm going to try and be nice and try and make friends with bulls who are going to stampede over me my whole life.
And so you don't have, you don't Don't develop empathy.
If you're treated brutally, then the environment is giving you signals that it's a win-lose environment, and therefore, if you're in a win-lose environment, a war environment, a theft environment, if you're in a win-lose environment, then empathy is a handicap.
If you're in a win-win environment, then a lack of empathy is a handicap.
You're going to be ostracized and maybe thrown in jail or whatever, right?
So your entire system is scanning.
What's the environment?
Are we win-lose or are we win-win?
And if you experience hostility, neglect, abuse, and so on from your caregivers, then you're in a win-lose, right?
And you see, what your parents do to you when you're a child is society.
It is society, you understand?
This is really, really important.
And this is something I see.
Everyone else, I don't know, just about everyone else seems to be completely blind to it, but it's completely obvious to me.
Because you're in a tribe, right?
You're in an extended family, and there are very few people who raise children in complete isolation, right?
Most people, they have brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles, cousins, and grandparents, and blah, blah, blah.
There's a whole tribe there.
And so, if you are being abused or neglected by your mom, then your system doesn't make decisions about your mom in that environment, because that would be ridiculous.
That would be like having no concept of a chair if you saw a chair painted a slightly different color than the one you learned what a chair was.
You absorb your mother's cruelty as social cruelty because your mother's cruelty is occurring within an extended tribal environment, which is not interfering and not stopping and not preventing and not this and that and the other, right?
So I say to people, step in in a situation of child abuse because if you don't, then the body adapts to a general social environment of win-lose and cruelty.
Where virtue is punished, and therefore virtue is a sucker's game, is a fool's game, right?
Because if nobody intervenes in a situation of child abuse, then the child understands that the abuse perpetrated by the parents is socially accepted, is fine, is good, society has no problems with it, in fact, encourages it, and no good people step up to stop it, which means that virtue is...
It's on the losing side significantly and that virtue is not, right?
Virtue has no confidence.
You understand this is a whole big topic, right?
But if you don't ever intervene in a situation of child abuse, then you are communicating that virtue is a fool's game, that virtuous people, even if they exist, are terrified of evil people and therefore, you know, side with evil and all that.
But you see...
Empathy is fundamental to volunteerism, and a lack of empathy is fundamental to statism.
So, when you don't have empathy, other people are objects to you, for you to use to your own advantage.
And you may use them for sexual pleasure, you may use them for financial advantage, you may use them for status, if they're pretty and whatever, right?
You may use them for ego gratification, for adoration of you.
Or you may use them to keep yourself down, to stay in a humiliated position, to seek out abusers, to maintain your low-cost status.
But you use them.
Fundamentally, you may use them to avoid feelings of loneliness.
You may use them to support crazy ideas that you have or addictions that you have or whatever.
But you use them.
They are means to an end.
They are not ends in themselves.
You don't take pleasure in them.
You're not curious about them.
You don't have any more than you ask about the inner lives of the cows you have if you're a farmer.
And you just use them.
I mean, you may have some rough feelings, like kind feelings for them or not treat them badly or whatever.
But eventually, I mean, you still use them for their milk, right?
And this is sort of fundamental to statism.
This lack of empathy...
It's fundamental to statism.
Because if you don't get that other people have their own thoughts and feelings and preferences, if you don't fundamentally get this, or if you do get it, you only get it as, well, this is how you manipulate them.
Right?
Like, computers have an input and will respond to your stimuli...
And that's called playing a video game.
But we don't ask the computer if the computer feels like playing that game or if the computer would feel like playing some other game.
We do our inputs, our keyboards, our mouse, our Kinect, our whatever we stick.
But we don't...
So if we understand that the computer has an input that we manipulate the computer with, but we don't believe, of course, that the computer has feelings and thoughts of its own and so on.
And so this is the way.
So, I mean, sociopaths and...
Or narcissists.
They're good at manipulating because they know what makes you tick.
They know that you have inputs that provide positive and negative responses and they're, you know, expert organists of playing the brain and the nervous system.
But not because they have empathy for your thoughts and feelings, but because you have things that they want to get and manipulation is less risky than violence, right?
I mean, some of them, of course, will go violence, but And so this lack of empathy is so foundational.
So, of course, one of the things that has come out of economics and sort of political science over the last decade or two is the idea that, and I think people have even won Pulitzer Prize, not Pulitzer, sorry, Nobel Prizes or whatever for this, these insights, which is that people adapt to government programs.
People adapt to government programs.
Because government programs are put in place by people who do not view other human beings as having their own thoughts, feelings, and preferences, but rather as objects.
Right?
So, it's sort of like if you're a doctor and you find some unconscious guy with a head wound and you've got your doctor's kit with you, you're going to bind up his head wound and whatever, right?
You're going to get him to a hospital.
He's an object to be fixed.
I think there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course, that's a perfectly fine thing to do because he's unconscious or whatever, right?
He's going to help him, but he's not going to adapt to that.
Maybe when he wakes up, people are like, Doc, I wanted to kill myself and I'm mad at you for saving me or whatever, right?
But he is inert.
The person you're helping is inert.
He's unconscious.
He's like the bleeding guy in the ditch in the Good Samaritan tale.
He is inert.
And so this is the only way that you could remotely justify poverty programs, which are, of course, accurately named.
But if you think that people lack money, and that's the problem, and then if you give them money...
They will be better off.
You are not viewing them as sovereign, independent agents.
You are not viewing them as human beings who will make choices and adapt to what it is that you're doing.
You view them as empty vessels, and if you fill them up, well, by golly, they're full vessels.
So, if you have people who are making less than $10,000 a year, and you give them $2,000 a year, then they are the way they were before, but with $2,000 extra.
They are inert.
Right?
Like the guy who's got a head wound, he is the same as he was before, but he's got a bandage around his head, and he's being driven to a hospital or whatever, right?
He's just helped, but he's inert.
And this lack of empathy towards the effect that your decisions have on other people's decisions is really fundamental to statism.
It's really fundamental to statism.
The understanding...
That people adapt to changing circumstances requires that you empathize with the poor if you're planning a social program, right?
So you know the old problem, right?
So let's say that you want to give $2,000 a year to everyone making less than $10,000 a year.
Well, if you view people as inert, if you don't have empathy, then you will just look at it like you're putting icing on a cake.
Okay, the cake's not going to change.
You put icing on it.
So now it's like, well, look, all these people have $2,000 more.
And this program will, of course, fail.
And the reason that it will fail is that you haven't asked yourself the basic question, which is, if I'm making $9,000 a year and somebody offers me $2,000 a year, if I make $8,000 or less, what am I going to do?
Right?
You don't picture what the adaptation is going to be on the receiving end of the government program.
And that fundamental lack of empathy.
I mean, you can say that it's with good intentions.
I don't think it is.
But let's just say, you can say that it's with good intentions.
But good intentions without empathy is brutality.
It's brutality.
Right?
And, of course, we all know what happens if you have a program where you give $2,000 to everyone who's making less than $10,000 a year.
Well, everyone who's making $10,001 is going to drop their income.
And everyone who's making $11,000 a year is going to drop their income.
Because they gain $2,000, they lose $1,000.
Jobs at that level of income are crappy, by definition, really.
Maybe unless you're a painter or a podcaster.
But people will drop their income.
And people who are making $8,000 a year Have no incentive to improve their income because they have to slog all the way through $8,000, $8,500, $9,000, $10,000.
Because at what point does it become advantageous to not take part in this government program?
Maybe $17,000 a year, maybe $16,000 a year, but people are going to get stuck in this trough.
Because you've opened up this big sinkhole and all of these houses are going to start sliding in towards it.
So everyone who's making $11,000 is going to drop their income down to $10,000 so they get an extra $2,000.
And so on, right?
You're going to cause people's behavior to change.
Furthermore, employers are going to stop offering jobs in the pay range which nobody's interested in.
So the jobs that pay between $8,000 and $15,000 a year are going to kind of vanish because people don't want to do it.
And so, because workers won't work for those wages because it's easier to get the other money, right?
Stay at $8,000, get $10,000.
Stay at $9,000, get $11,000.
Stay at $10,000, get $12,000.
So, what happens is there's fewer people who want to do those jobs, which means that those jobs are going to have to be bid up significantly in price.
All that means is that people are going to want to automate it or they're going to want to eliminate those jobs, right?
Like, you're not going to get a guy to bag your groceries.
You're not going to get a guy to...
Clean your windshields on your car, whatever it is.
All the little touches that actually make life kind of nice.
People aren't going to want to do that.
The services are just going to be dropped.
Or, you know, if it's cashiers, you're going to put automatic teller machines in or you're going to get...
Now they have these machines where you can check out your own groceries or check out your own goods at Walmart or whatever.
So you're just going to replace all of those jobs.
And there's going to be a vacuum that opens up in the hiring market and in the job pay market.
Particularly, there's going to be a Bermuda Triangle, a dead zone around these wages.
And what that means, of course, is that even the people who want to work are not going to find jobs very easily.
And so they're going to end up more and more people piling onto these government programs.
And of course, because it's like $8,000 to $15,000 that people don't want to work at, all the people who were formerly getting jobs at $11,000, $12,000, $13,000, $14,000, $15,000 find those jobs drying up.
So, as those jobs dry up or get bid out, if they can't be automated, then just fewer people end up doing it because the wages go up and so on, right?
We have to go up to overcome the attractiveness of the welfare program.
And so, those people can't find work.
And because those people can't find work, they also slide into the Government program.
And then what happens is you point out that more and more people need this program, therefore it has to be expanded.
And you've created a constituency of people who want this program, who are now stuck in this trough, and they can't get out of it because the jobs have all been carved away, their resumes have died off, you know, they've lost the work ethic, lost the work experience, lost the general growth of getting to decent jobs.
You know, I went all the way from, I guess in 1977, when I was 10 or 11, or 10 I think, I was painting...
Plaques for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. And that got all the way to being a Chief Technical Officer at a software company.
But there was a constant stream of ever-increasing skills and abilities.
And so because there's this trough, more and more people need this.
You've created a constituency.
And they're stuck in this trough because the jobs that pay less than $15,000 a year have kind of dried up and vanished or are hard to get.
And so these people can't get...
I mean, they have kids, so then they need more money, but they're stuck in this trough of $8,000 to $14,000 a year.
And so they demand increases in the social programs.
And when they demand these increases in the social programs, of course, there's constituencies, lots of sad-eyed children and reporters who will write about all this terrible stuff, advocates who will accuse the politicians of not caring about the poor, And not knowing how hard they've got it and all this increase in homelessness, whatever.
I mean, the standard propaganda for increases in government programs will take place, and then you'll have to expand it.
And you have to say, okay, well, so given that there's a lot of poverty still around $12,000 or $13,000, we're now going to give $3,000 to that group.
And that, of course, carves out the jobs that pay between $15,000 and $20,000.
And, you know, then anybody who's making, you know, $15,000 is going to drop down.
So you get this whole cycle, you understand?
Yeah.
We all get this, right?
You get this whole cycle.
And that's fundamentally because you haven't understood how people are going to respond to what it is that you're doing.
You have not understood that these people are human beings and they're going to make rational economic calculation decisions based on the disutility of work and the utility of money.
They don't like work.
They like money.
And they're going to make rational decisions based upon what you're offering them.
And what you're doing changes the environment.
The environment is going to adapt to what it is that you are doing.
So the guy who drinks and hits his wife and sleeps around, his wife leaves him.
He's like shocked and appalled and angry.
It's like, well, because what you're doing has changed the environment.
Now your wife does not want to stay married to you.
And you can see this happening over and over again.
Stimulus packages.
Oh, let's pour a lot of money into the economy and blah, blah, blah.
Well, people are going to adapt to that.
The financial services industry is going to adapt to that.
Unions are going to adapt to that.
Government workers are going to adapt to that.
Everyone is going to adapt to that.
Here's lots of free stuff because we're going to pay for it, pseudo-pay for it, with debt and inflation, debt and printing of money.
And so all of this stuff changes.
And it's a fundamental lack of empathy, fundamental lack of empathy to know that when you start screwing around with society, you change what people do.
People will adapt to what it is that you're doing.
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