Written by Thom Hartmann
“In my work with the defendants [at Nuremberg], I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.” — Captain Gustave Gilbert, the US army psychologist assigned to observe the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
You don’t expect moral leadership from mice. And yet, in a recent study, rodents showed more empathy, urgency, and compassion for strangers than the men currently shaping our nation’s future. While lab mice display empathy by resuscitating unconscious cage-mates, Trump and Musk gleefully slash food aid, housing support, and global relief efforts — all cheered on by a right-wing movement that now sees empathy as a fatal weakness.
Back in the days when I was rostered by the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist and ran a residential treatment facility for severely abused children, one of the things I was painfully aware of was the lack of empathy (the ability to experience or identify with the feelings of others) displayed by psychopaths.
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