Why Empathy Is the Foundation of Civilization

Before looking at the way empathy has recently been under attack, it helps to understand what it is and what it isn’t. Professor Gad Saad calls empathy a “noble emotion,” but it’s not an emotion. A few American Christian leaders have labelled empathy a “sin,” but it’s actually a brain function. As neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen researches, empathy is neural circuitry in the brain that engages at least 10 regions. It is cognitive (thinking) and affective (feeling).

Babies are born wired for empathy as they need to understand what people, upon whom they depend are thinking, feeling, and intending. A quick video by professor of social work Brené Brown is an effective way to understand empathy in action and how it differs from sympathy.

Eroded empathy

While you might use your cognitive empathy to read someone like a book, understanding their thinking, feeling, and intending, if you can’t feel their pain, do not relate or respond on a brain level to their thoughts, emotions, and intentions, it might lead you to maltreat them. It could mean your affective empathy is eroded, which is how neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen documents psychopathic behaviour on a brain level.

One of the early indicators of a lack of empathy or psychopathology in children is their harming of animals. The lack of brain level reaction to causing a creature or person pain and suffering is a red flag of “empathy erosion.” Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explains: “Empathy is intrinsic to morality.” If an individual does not feel the pain of their target, a key tenet in bullying and abuse behaviours, they also do not feel guilt, remorse, or regret. In other words, if we want to examine empathy through an ethical lens it is a virtue, not a sin.

Empathy and ethics

According to McGilchrist, empathy is your capacity to “inhibit” your “natural impulse to selfishness.” It is what makes you think twice about stealing from someone, hitting her, abandoning him, ignoring a colleague, enjoying someone’s suffering. Those who lack empathy are described by psychologists Paul Babiak and Robert Hare as “snakes in suits” when they are at work. When in a family, Babiak and Hare note the pattern in psychopathic parenting as producing “a large number of children, with little or no emotional and physical investment in their well-being.”

Despite empathy's civilizing impact on humanity throughout time, in late February 2025, entrepreneur and head of the Department for Government Efficiency Elon Musk publicly denigrated empathy as a weakness that puts civilization at risk. On a podcast with Joe Rogan, Musk said empathy is the “fundamental weakness” of Western civilization.

He draws this idea from marketing professor Gad Saad, who is a frequent guest on the Rogan podcast. Musk echoes him: “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” When Musk refers to a “bug,” it’s helpful to understand what he means. Saad compares humanity’s empathy to parasitic insects like the “hair worm” that “hijacks” the “brain” of a wood cricket and leads it into water where it drowns.

Is empathy a parasite or is psychopathology?

Saad sees empathic care as comparable to having a parasite that draws on our resources and leads us into danger as individuals and as a civilization. Saad’s 2020 book was about “parasitic minds,” and he’s working on a new one about "suicidal empathy." For him, and Musk, the ideas are linked. “Parasitic mind is what happens to human brains when their cognitive abilities are parasitized,” Saad explained in a recent podcast. “We’re both a thinking and feeling animal. Suicidal empathy completes the story by now explaining what happens when [human emotions are] hijacked by parasitic nonsense, and hence suicidal empathy. It’s the misfiring of an otherwise noble emotion called empathy.”

In their study of psychopaths, Babiak and Hare reach the opposite conclusion: “Because they do not see others as equals or as having any legitimate claim to resources, psychopaths see no need to share resources. In fact, their parasitic, competitive nature drives them to actively siphon off resources from others.” Psychopaths destroy workplaces and people. They do not build them up. They ruin individuals and their careers. They feel nothing when others suffer. Their lack of empathy is exactly—from a brain science perspective—what allows them to do harm ranging from bullying to killing.

Because of the profound harm that comes from empathy erosion, psychiatrist Helen Reiss writes that our evolutionary impulse to put those into an out-group who do not resemble us needs to be rectified. She sees this biased reaction as a way to ensure survival in ancient times. If you lived in a tribe, it was valuable to recognize difference as a potential threat. In the twenty-first century, this bias is no longer useful like an appendix.

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In today's world, the unconscious impulse to put others into out-groups is outright dangerous and can lead to degrading, demeaning, and dehumanizing, as a quick glance at history and contemporary geopolitical crises demonstrate. Reiss warns us that empathy and power maintain an inverse relationship. The more power an individual has, the less empathy. As president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Jeremy Rifkin notes, history documents the “pathology of power,” whereas empathy “is the very means by which we create social life and advance civilization.”

When we care about one another, not just our family or group but everyone, we build a healthy, strong civilized community. When we look at decades of research into the ways animals express empathy for one another and for us, in ways that make human cruelty look positively psychopathic by comparison, we create healthier ecosystems and communities.

Finally, as shown by professor of forest and conservation science Suzanne Simard, trees and plants share in their own way a deep sense of empathy. Rifkin concludes, “The message is we are not alone in our ability to empathize. This simple but profound realization can’t help but change the way we perceive our fellow creatures as well as strengthen our sense of responsibility to steward the Earth we cohabit.”