Empathy makes you weak. This is a message that Charlie Kirk is supposed to have communicated to his millions of followers. Interestingly, he never actually said this; Elon Musk is the one who did. In an interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, Musk remarked that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” You should care about other people, he reluctantly concedes, but then he doubles down: “there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself.”

Kirk’s comments about empathy are different but more extreme. Criticizing Bill Clinton, he opines: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that—it does a lot of damage.” Kirk also looks like he will concede his point by admitting that some people should, at times, feel sympathy for others, but he waves that conversation away. He is assuming that the distinction between empathy and sympathy is both clear and significant. It is not.

First off, Kirk’s history is a fiction. The word empathy is neither made up, nor new age. “Empathy” was first coined in English by the American psychologist Edward Titchener as an attempt the translate the German word Einfühlung. The literal translation is “feeling into.” Titchener was contributing to a complex debate about how people make moral decisions that was central to the work of eighteenth-century philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith. They used the term sympathy because that’s the only word they had.

Smith, for what it’s worth, saw empathy (sympathy) as a necessary precondition for moral free markets. This is noteworthy because it shows that empathy is not a byproduct of the so-called radical Marxists that Musk and Kirk claim everyone to their left is. Empathy is actually part of the evolution of capitalism. I talk about this in my book Adam Smith’s Pluralism. More on this in a moment.

Does empathy make people weak, as Elon Musk claims?  Before I answer that, I think it’s important to recognize that his and Kirk’s discussion of empathy isn’t about political strategy as they want us to think. It is actually an essential element of their theory of masculinity. They are part of the “manosphere,” a subculture obsessed with defining what a real man is, filled with adherents who are fixated on their reputations. The worst thing in the world, to them, is to be a “cuck,” that is to encounter someone stronger than you are, whose very existence humiliates you and makes you indistinguishable from a woman. (Actually, I should adjust the previous sentence. To be a cuck is the second worst thing in the manosphere. To be a woman seems to be the worst.) A great man is an alpha, according to them, whereas all betas are inherently failures. Masculinity is a zero-sum affair, it seems. One person gets it by taking it away from others.

This is why empathy is perceived as a weakness. If I feel for someone else, it means they are cuckolding me, and my status and manhood plummet. Now, this is neither here nor there, but the manosphere’s perception of cuckoldry is at odds with what the term really means and, despite what pop-culture tells us, there are no such things as alpha or beta wolves. However, none of their comments have anything to do with fact. Kirk, Musk, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes and others are developing a mythology of masculinity that isolates men, makes sexual relationships into conquests, teaches boys to fear, hate, and abuse women (and anyone who expresses anything beyond the most performative heterosexuality), and promises to subordinate all other emotions to anger and the attack-instinct.

Let’s consider for a moment what this critique of empathy means. Imagine that you are walking down the street with your best friend. They trip and twist their ankle, but not so much that they can’t continue. They ask you to slow down because their ankle hurts. Empathy allows you to do so happily. However, if everything is a competition, if empathy is weakness, then the proper response is to laugh at your friend, walk faster, and glory in your own superiority.

I can imagine Kirk responding to this by falling back on the empathy/sympathy distinction. The terms are fluid, but sympathy usually denotes pity while empathy denotes shared experiences. An alpha may pity a beta, Kirk might argue, but he should not perceive any equality in their emotional experience. To do so would be to become a cuck.

So, I suppose one might imagine slowing down for their hurt friend to laugh and ridicule them, or to lord over their companion with their able-bodiedness. But they can’t do it out of love or respect, because that undermines their competitive relationship. If this is indeed the case, then I suppose we ought to revise my scenario to remove the term friends from the initial description. One does not treat their friends this way. This is how they behave with prey. Can members of the manosphere actually have friends? I’m having trouble imagining how that would work.

[As I was editing the layout of this essay, my daughter sent me this fascinating TikTok from @aidanetcetera, via @realjakebro on X. It argues that the Charlie Kirk’s murder is best understood as a “shitpost,” rather than a political assasination. I have no idea if this is true, but the TikTok echoes my previous paragraph when it claims that these young “Groypers” are consumed with the feeling that “you’re always gonna be alone. You’re never gonna have a future. And you’re never gonna have a voice.” The quote starts at 3:38.]

It’s easy to see how this translates to politics. In a zero-sum world, the alpha nation refuses to aid or even care about the betas that surround it. In a hyper-competitive environment for political power, the President cannot and should not offer aid to states recovering from floods or wildfires. This should serve as a cautionary tale for President Trump’s supporters. J.D. Vance thinks he’s going to be the next president. Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Peter Hegseth, Doug Burgum and others think that they have futures in politics, but they do not. Trump is the alpha, so they are all cucks. (Kristi Noem doesn’t count, in their world. She’s a woman and a tool. She is disposable.) The young men who have catapulted Trump to power will never release their disdain for those Trump used to get what he wanted. This is the necessary outcome of their way of looking at the world.

This is all very bleak. It’s divisive and it makes me sad. I ache for the younger generation whose reality is corrupted by this regressive caricature of humanity and I long for the true statesperson who leads with virtuous civic duty and honorable intentions. Maybe in a world of school shootings and online exploitation, an all-against-all mentality is attractive, but from the outsiders’ perspective, it’s so shallow and bafflingly obviously destructive, that it’s hard to figure out why anyone finds this stuff compelling. The manosphere thrives off of broken young men. It is exploiting the weakness and insecurity of those who perceive the world as too big and too powerful to have a place for them.

This is where empathy comes in. Adam Smith referred to it as fellow-feeling (again, he used the term sympathy). In part, he uses it to disagree with Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher whose Leviathan provides an entire political theory based on an all-against-all worldview. Empathy counters this atomism and alienation. It involves entering into the perspective of another person and trying your best to feel what they are feeling. For Smith, building empathy was about paying close attention to others, internalizing their contexts, and intentionally imagining being who they are as individuals. In one of my favorite quotes, Smith writes,

“When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own. It is not, therefore, in the least selfish. How can that be regarded as a selfish passion, which does not arise even from the imagination of any thing that has befallen, or that relates to myself, in my own proper person and character, but which is entirely occupied about what relates to you?” (TMS VII.iii.1.4)

The father who loses his son is not grief-stricken in a generic way. His soul is destroyed in its particularity. Empathy recognizes this uniqueness even as it embraces commonality. The empathizer uses all their skills to reach this uniqueness and share the moment with the grieving dad.

Empathy is the process of feeling for another person because their humanity is worth something in and of itself. It is an acknowledgment that other people’s joy, suffering, experiences, values, goals, and contributions are inherently meaningful, even if, in the end, people don’t share one another’s particular commitments. Empathy is a way of offering up yourself as a partner and companion in life, to push against the nihilism and absurdity of the things that happen to us, with or without our consent. It is a testament to the reality that humanity, respect, and dignity are not zero-sum affairs, as Musk and Kirk suggest. The more we give to others, the more we all become individuals, communities, and part of the human race.

For Smith, empathy was the tool through which we cultivate our own identity. We learn from others, compare ourselves to them, strive to meet their expectations of us. Like all philosophy it gets really complicated very fast, but he summarizes it like this:

“Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face. All these are objects which he cannot easily see, which naturally he does not look at, and with regard to which he is provided with no mirror which can present them to his view. Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriety and impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and deformity of his own mind.” (TMS III.1.3).

Beauty means nothing in a universe of one person. Neither does goodness. We need each other to encounter these valuations, to negotiate ugliness and evil, and to live together, especially in a world full of scarcity.

Empathy is what allows us to gauge our moral intuitions and police our treatment of others and ourselves. It’s a necessary component of governance, something both Presidents Clinton and Obama knew (Obama referred to the “empathy deficit,” which we are certainly experiencing now.)  This is one of the reasons why Musk and Kirk refer to it with such derision. For them, empathy is the tool of the enemy, the Democrats, nothing more. Neither of them ever publicly indicated any deeper thoughts on the subject than what I’ve quoted, yet empathy is a rich topic. Exploring it makes us all better.

Empathy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for social unity. This is another reason many are rejecting it now. The foundation of any democracy is social trust and much of what is happening is eroding the ground upon which America stands. Citizens’ relationships with one another are far more important that their faith in their government. In a free society, people and the government are supposed to be at odds. They are the checks and balances for each other. But the individual people, the governed, need to be committed to the same game. They don’t have to be on the same team. The Superbowl needs two teams to compete at their best, after all. But the opposing players must be governed by fair play, a commitment to the same rules, and an appreciation of each other’s talents and discipline. When the Quarterback gets sacked, the opposing team shouldn’t kick him in the face until he’s comatose then jump in the stands, shoot his kids, and kidnap his wife.

The very people who claim to be offended by those celebrating Kirk’s death are also the people who have dismissed empathy for decades. They are the ones who have legitimized cold-hearted disdain for the victimization of our neighbors. Here are two articles about the Republican attack on empathy in the judiciary from sixteen years ago (here and here). Here is a link to Martha Nussbaum’s wonderful defense of judicial empathy, Poetic Justice, published back in 2009. And for the hell of it, here is a link about empathy in the book of Exodus. This discussion is not new. It goes as far back as recorded history does.

This isn’t just philosophy, by the way. There is significant evidence that empathy is hardwired into human beings. Studies suggest that babies can show empathy as early as nine months old. Researchers believe it is cultivated through human touch. And, as Smith pointed out (as did Aristotle before him), human beings are pack animals. We could not coordinate our actions without empathy. We need to read, anticipate, and communicate our intentions and behaviors to create, build, hunt, raise children, and survive. It’s no surprise that Adam Smith focused so much on empathy in his moral work because it is assumed by his political economy. Humanity’s great tool is the division of labor or, as I call it in my first book on Smith “the “conjoining of human labor.” Homo sapiens cannot exist without empathy.

My heart breaks for Charlie Kirk’s wife and his kids because I have empathy for them. My fellow-feeling for them is a sign of my strength, not my weakness. I don’t have to ask, “did I agree with Charlie Kirk’s politics ?’ to acknowledge his survivors’ suffering. I don’t have to evaluate whether he was good or bad for America to recognize that first, his wife and kids are not him, and they have the right to their sorrow, and second, that the loss of any life prematurely is a tragedy and cold-hearted murder is as far from justice as we can get. All lives matter, after all.

We are at a very difficult time in history and the whole world needs all of us at our best, not at our worst. Empathy is the substance that makes up what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Here’s something you might want to do. Watch Alex Garland’s prophetic film Civil War (2024), which offers a chilling but believable glimpse into what might be six-months down the road from us, right now. Then, remember Lincoln’s words that led up to his image of better angels and ask yourself which of the two options are to be preferred.

Lack of empathy prefigures the destruction of societies. Its absence is not strength. It’s suicide.

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” President Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861. 

---

Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Philosophy at Public Life at the University of North Dakota. He is the author of four books and the host of two public radio shows, Why? Philosophical Discussions of Everyday Life and Philosophical Currents.

Follow Dr. Weinstein on X, Threads, and Bluesky.

Note: Cover photo: Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash. This article has been edited since its initial publication for typos and minor content changes.

---