During our RTO mandates, and after a huge layoff, we had an executive who was broadcasting in front of her glass wine cellar. The head of technology would address entire rooms full of people from his $5m mansion’s custom engraved kitchen and tell us we weren’t going to have performance based bonuses that year (he was paid double).
I’m fucking sorry, but Elon saying “excess empathy is a societal problem” is one of the most evil things I’ve heard from someone with significant power this century.
This is Sesame Street, preschool, kindergarten level values and morals that people somehow still safe to flaunt. They all walk this path at their own peril.
During covid, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson gave a virtual meeting from his house, and the camera was perfectly framed on a bookshelf behind him that I presume was expertly curated/arranged specifically for the purpose.
Wasn’t Elon referring to westerners feeling obligated to help everyone in the world with respect to refugees and immigration?
I don’t think he was referring to local empathy towards humans you are physically with or your countrymen? Though if taken out of context I can see how someone could reach that conclusion.
What do you mean claim? Like, that is an extremely unpopular, borderline heretical opinion already in the west. If what he actually meant was “empathy in general is bad and you should be self centered” or whatever, then laundering it to “excessive empathy for foreigners is bad” is not the spot you’d want to launder it to, if it were indeed laundering and not what he actually meant.
>Like, that is an extremely unpopular, borderline heretical opinion already in the west.
Not these days, or at least not in the US. With all the federal cuts has come more public acceptance of openly deploring empathy for people not in your immediate circle. Witness, e.g., Vice President's Vance's widely-discussed comments on the "ordo amoris". Tribalism of this kind is somewhat in vogue. And, more generally, in the rightwing media ecosystem the idea that kindness or empathy is a kind of weakness to be disdained has been bubbling for a long time.
All that is to say, Musk seems like someone who genuinely believes empathy is a problem in general. The way he runs his companies, treats his worker, his own children (the ones he bothers to even be around, anyway), nothing comes across as the behavior of a man who sees any value in empathy for others.
So, to conclude, I think even he knows how distasteful his true views are to most people and so is couching them in terms that are as far as the current climate will let him go in public.
Okay what percent of people in America do you think aren’t offended by the statement “empathy towards foreigners is bad”?
I try hard to understand the perspective of everyone along the entire political spectrum, all the way out to the farest of the far right. People who actually want to roll back the immigration and refugee policies to say the 1950s are like less than 5% of the population at most. Most people on the right are still offended by that statement.
I’m fucking sorry, but Elon saying “excess empathy is a societal problem” is one of the most evil things I’ve heard from someone with significant power this century.
This is Sesame Street, preschool, kindergarten level values and morals that people somehow still safe to flaunt. They all walk this path at their own peril.