REUTERS/Craig Hudson
OPINION
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
May 08, 2025
AlterNet
AlterNet
Dwayne LaBrecque, a diabetic who lost several toes and part of his foot to infection, will be severely impacted by cuts to LIHEAP, the Low Income Fuel Oil Heating Program that Congress started in 1981 and Donald Trump and Elon Musk put on the chopping block.
After losing his job as a shipping manager, Dwayne’s income plummeted, making it difficult to support his fiancée and five children in rural Maine. He expressed grave concern about making it through next winter without this assistance, stating:
“If the president turned around and did away with that funding, I have no idea how we'd survive in the winter.”
But Trump and congressional Republicans don’t care: the budget Trump just released and they’re endorsing kills off LIHEAP.
Empathy is the ability to experience what another person is going through as a real sensation, a genuine emotion or even physical reaction, in body and mind. It’s what causes us to flinch or look away when we see a dog getting hit by a car or a fellow human experiencing real trauma.
Early on in my years rostered as a psychotherapist in the 1980s, I learned that there’s a subset of the human race — maybe we should call them “Lizard People” because they’re so cold-blooded — who literally lack the ability to experience what others are going through. Instead of being empathic, their processing of other people’s pain (or joy or elation or any sensation or emotion) is entirely intellectual.
They see what others are going through, but they don’t feel even a twitch of emotion; just an abstract understanding of what’s happening.
These Lizard People are usually referred to by folks in the mental health field as sociopaths or psychopaths. They represent a third of our prison populations (and account for 90% of violent crimes), around 1.5-4 percent of the general population, and a bit more than one-fifth (21 percent) of all our CEOs.
A few, who were born or raised with a strong moral compass even though they’re empathy-deficient, work hard to try to understand what others are going through.
Most, though, view empathy as a fundamental human flaw; they believe that because they’re not burdened by it they’re special, even superior to other humans. After all, they can do things that would keep most people up at night for years, all without thinking twice or any later reflection on their deeds.
People like this are often fond of quoting Nietzsche and his extensive pontifications about what he called the Übermensch, the “over-men” or “Super-men.” As he wrote in Will to Power #368:
“Pity is a waste of feeling, a moral parasite which is injurious to the health, ]which says] ‘it cannot possibly be our duty to increase the evil in the world.’ If one does good merely out of pity, it is one's self and not One's neighbor that one is succouring. Pity does not depend upon maxims, but upon emotions. The suffering we see infects us; pity is an infection."
Nietzsche attacked Schopenhauer’s idea that there is a “morality of pity” or empathy, as well as calling Christianity a “religion of pity.” Hitler was so impressed that he laid a wreath inscribed with “To a Great Fighter” at Nietzsche’s grave.
Much like Ayn Rand, Nietzsche also hated the modern (this was in the late 1800s) state, including the then-new (1883) German system of single payer free healthcare. He called liberal democracy the “new idol” that was, he said, in fact “the coldest of all cold monsters” because this modern form of government was based on empathy, on the common good, on the general welfare instead of greed and self-interest.
It’s this same lack of empathy that would allow Trump to gleefully keep Kilmar Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadoran concentration camp.
A lack of empathy is what would encourage JD Vance and Marco Rubio to gang up like schoolyard bullies against Volodymir Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, or allow Stephen Miller to reportedly think tearing children from their mothers was a good idea and let him “enjoy” seeing the pictures of crying kids as their mothers are led away.
In fact, empathy is at the core of modern civilization, and has defined civilized people for tens of thousands of years. As I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, concern for every member of their communities — regardless of gender, gender identity, or disability — is what led tribal people around the world to create largely egalitarian political structures throughout prehistory. Structures on which we based our Constitution.
Empathy is foundational to every major religion in the world; Jesus’ sacrifice of his life for his followers is the ultimate expression of empathy. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Love your enemies,” and the story of the Good Samaritan are among the highest expressions of empathy.
Empathy is the basis of unions, where workers band together to protect each other, and employers are required by law to recognize them.
It’s the basis of our public education system, where we all chip in to make sure that even the poorest and weakest among us can have a positive future.
It’s even the basis of business, where the core of good marketing is understanding what your customers need and the core of good management is having a sense of how to motivate your employees because you can imagine what they feel.
It’s also at the core of democracy, is the basis of modern law, and has been intrinsic to our constitutional system of governance since our nation’s first days. As so many of our nation’s Founders noted:
“The social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpated from the earth, or have only a casual existence, were we callous to the touches of affection.” —Thomas Paine
“Common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy.” —Alexander Hamilton
It’s why the preamble and Article I of our Constitution both mention the “General Welfare,” and all persons in the United States are supposed to be beneficiaries of the due process rights guaranteed in the fourth through eighth amendments to the Constitution (Trump appears not to understand this).
It’s why the basis of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society were all about lifting up people in distress and giving powerless workers the ability to fight back against poverty, hunger, and greedy CEOs.
Tragically, the Lizard People currently running our federal government appear to lack empathy. Trump keeps finding new and more brutal ways to punish and imprison people he dislikes; his latest kick is rebooting Alcatraz.
He doesn’t give a damn about Dwayne LaBrecque; hell, if he could figure out a rationalization for it he’d probably deport him.
Vance had to be corrected by the Pope when he argued that we should love our family more than the rest of humanity.
And Musk waxes poetic about his disdain for empathy and the policies it produces, referring to the crisis of “civilizational suicidal empathy” caused by progressive policies.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” he told an interviewer. “The empathy exploit—they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
The simple reality is that empathy is the thing that differentiates a healthy, caring civilization from brutal regimes like Nazi Germany or Putin’s Russia. It built America and has — until recently — guided our progress, generation by generation, toward a “more perfect union” in which all members of society are valued and protected.
Post-Eisenhower Republicans, however, have chosen to embrace an America run by fossil fuel billionaires spending millions to deny climate change, bankers ripping off their customers and the nation’s students, and insurance company executives who deny healthcare payments to guarantee their own million-dollar bonuses.
These Lizard People condemn “bleeding heart liberals” while blithely cutting off food and education to poor children, prenatal and child care to young women, and housing to the homeless. They celebrate Trump’s efforts to kneecap food stamps, education, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They prioritize tax cuts for billionaires over the lives of families devastated by extreme weather, the sick, and the homeless.
A nation without empathy is not a nation at all; it’s merely a conspiracy to elevate the powerful while crushing the weak, a crime syndicate with a flag and an army. This ultimate expression of a governmental system based on the repudiation of empathy is called fascism, oligarchy, or authoritarianism.
Lacking empathy, our society is left an empty husk, a simulacrum of civilization, a hollow shell where the GOP’s mantra of “personal responsibility” echoes through government’s dusty, blood-stained halls as it poisons the pages of history.
It’s the takeover of the cold-blooded Lizard People, heralding the death of democracy as well as our essential humanity.
But only if we let them. Pass it on.
Global News
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