At the end of February, the world’s richest human appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and made some confused comments about empathy.
Elon Musk’s public speaking isn’t the most coherent at the best of times, so it’s not always absolutely clear what his meanings and motivations are.
“Two People. The Lonely Ones.” (1899/1917) by Edvard Munch [Public domain]
As with his infamous Hitler salutes, he regularly and purposely muddies the waters after the fact – a strategy regularly used by figures on the far right to excuse frankly awful statements as “just a joke,” even as they double down on the content of the statements.
This time, Musk was promoting a concept of “suicidal empathy.”
We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And, it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
Like, it’s weaponized empathy is the issue. Weaponized empathy.
It’s important not to be taken in by the I myself believe in X, but our enemies have twisted it into Y formulation, which is of a piece with the classic I’m not racist, but… template.
In fact, Musk literally says, “I think you should care about other people, but…” and “I think empathy is good, but…”
Instead of taking the qualified assurances about his personal commitment to empathy at face value, let’s look at the rest of his statement.
David Lane and Genghis Khan
Musk asserts that the true object of empathy is “civilization as a whole,” but he immediately qualifies this as “Western civilization,” a favorite and extremely slippery longtime fixation of white nationalists.
What exactly is the “Western civilization” that the South African Musk wants to save from bad elements?
Does it include non-white inhabitants of the U.S. and European countries? Does it include the lengthy tradition of western progressivism? Does it include Angela Davis, liberation theology, and hardcore punk?
No, it’s pretty clear that these and a host of other non-right-wing, non-white, non-males are exactly the “they” he asserts are destroying “Western civilization.”
This panic over the supposedly slipping status of white men has long been expressed by the notorious white nationalist slogan known as the “14 words,” coined in the mid-1980s by David Lane of the white supremacist terrorist group called The Order: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Far-right adherents of American Paganism have modified the phrase in repeated attempts to make it their own, such as in the Ásatrú Folk Assembly (AFA) Declaration of Purpose that puts both pseudo-scientific and pseudo-spiritual spins on it: “the survival and welfare of the European peoples as a cultural and biological group is a religious imperative for the AFA.”
Musk’s fixation on always acting as if he’s the smartest one in the room leads him to promote similarly pseudo-intellectual statements like the empathy assertion.
His fearmongering over the bugaboo of “civilizational suicidal empathy” and his assertion of himself as hero of the West, arising from apartheid South Africa to drive the undesirables out of the United States, lines up exactly with the 14-worders and with the infamous Charlottesville neo-Nazis who chanted “you will not replace us.”
Paralleling both David Lane’s fixation on white children and the AFA’s pairing of biology and culture, the billionaire businessman has been advocating since at least 2005 for saving “civilization” through purposely increasing birth rates – especially by acting out his open obsession with Genghis Khan’s widely dispersed genes by spreading his own genetic material via IVF and surrogacy and providing his own DNA for at least 14 children (one for each word!) by four different mothers.
When Musk calls empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization” and “a bug in Western civilization” while decrying supposedly “weaponized empathy,” he’s reaching even farther back in the history of far-right propaganda.
“This German national weakness”
In a 1942 issue of the Nazi newspaper Das Reich, German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels published an essay titled “Seid nicht allzu gerecht!” (“Don’t be too fair!).
The cringing praise that Goebbels pays to Adolf Hitler is reminiscent of the obsequious compliments that Musk pays to Donald Trump. While ranting against Winston Churchill, Goebbels writes:
One cannot imagine that the English would grant the Führer any trace of justice at all, even though all that he is and has accomplished is the result of his own efforts, though he lives a life of almost legendary simplicity, and has shaken the entire world with his ideas.
But it is the main point of Goebbels that Musk echoes in his comments on empathy. “We Germans,” writes the propagandist, “must still learn to hate.”
We are on our side, prejudiced, stubborn and selfish in this regard. Do not tell us that is not German. It may be that the opposite is German, but if so, it is a bad and dangerous side of our national character that we must fight.
Should we be so objective and fair that in the end we do ourselves an injustice? Even [German poet Friedrich Gottlieb] Klopstock assailed this German national weakness when he told our people not to be too fair, for our enemies are not noble enough to see how lovely a mistake that is.
What is the opposite of selfish prejudice? Empathy for others, which Goebbels – prefiguring Musk’s “fundamental weakness of Western civilization” – calls a “national weakness” and “a bad and dangerous side of our national character.”
Building on this idea, Goebbels continues.
We therefore warn against any danger we see, and particularly against those with roots in our national character. The bourgeois era with its false and lying idea of humanitarianism is over.
We are in the middle of a hard century. It will be won not by good nature, but by manliness and strength. The world is divided by love and hate. To be on firm ground, one must know whom to love and whom to hate.
This could easily be taken from a manifesto for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), given his predilection for bizarre attempts at macho posturing and embrace of Trump’s “you’re fired” television catchphrase as a mantra of “efficiency” in federal government, even as Trump himself tells his dedicated followers “whom to love and whom to hate.”
The era of humanitarianism is indeed over.
But the Goebbels essay is not some one-off aberration.
“Poisoning the blood”
Back in 1935, the Reichspropagandaleitung (Central Party Propaganda Office of the Nazi Party) issued a series of bulletins that together formed a handbook for speakers to be used as a guide for public attacks on Jews in Germany.
Prefiguring Musk, the propaganda document asserts that Germans must “eliminate thoroughly uncalled-for humanitarianism and foolish sympathy.” Empathy must be replaced by “pitiless clarity.”
The Vampire (1895) by Edvard Munch [Public domain]
Some parts of the handbook are eerily reminiscent of attitudes, statements, and policies put forward by Musk, Trump, and the rest of the regime now in the White House.
Given the current focus on undoing longstanding legal protections regarding immigration – especially the attacks on birthright citizenship and the push to “denaturalize” U.S. citizens – it’s disturbing to read Nazi propaganda forwarding such similar concepts.
There has never been a “German” Jew, and there never will be one. As a member of race foreign to us, the Jew is always a foreigner who lives and dwells in Germany, but who will never become a German, not even in the tenth generation. A piece of paper called a naturalization certificate… can never make the Jew a “German citizen.”
Substitute whatever national origin Trump is obsessed with at the moment, and this reads like any one of a myriad of racist statements to come from the former reality TV host in the White House.
In a particularly revolting section titled “The Jew as Destroyer of Our Blood,” the tract insists that
National Socialist racial thinking clearly demands keeping our blood free from the destructive influences of the carriers of racially foreign blood. Anyone with even a superficial understanding of these things knows that eliminating Jews from public and governmental offices in no way met the demand to keep the blood pure.
Jewish Germans, it continues, are “slowly but surely poisoning or destroying the blood of a people.”
It’s important to grit our teeth and read this evil nonsense, because we have a president who only 15 months ago insisted that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and who has empowered the Tesla CEO to eliminate his supposed enemies “from public and governmental offices.”
One random alignment might be brushed off as coincidence, but there’s just too much to be found.
I’ve only addressed half the propaganda handbook, but it’s notable that this particular section concludes with a statement that “The German woman and the German girl are the guarantee of the future of our people, and we will be sure that they are kept pure for their people” – a statement that aligns with the 14 words and Musk’s own weird fixation on birthing as a salvific act.
Just because our nation’s current leaders are embracing all this crap doesn’t mean that we must.
Instead, we should embrace exactly that defining feature that so rattles Musk and his predecessors in the Third Reich. We should embrace empathy, including in our own public theology of Ásatrú and Heathenry.
A theology of empathy
Given all the chest-beating social Darwinism, rants about wolves and sheep, Viking cosplay, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and all the other hateful nonsense constantly bubbling to the surface of modern Heathen discourse, it must seem to outsiders that these are definitional to the modern religious practices.
It must seem that empathy has no place in our theology.
However, just as sane people don’t need to embrace the insanity of the Trumpies, Heathens of positive intent don’t need to take on any of the awfulness of the neo-völkisch haters and their ilk.
We can make empathy a central point of what we believe and what we practice.
In fact, empathy already does run behind and through much of Heathen theology.
According to the concept of wyrd, each of us has a spiritual thread that runs through our individual life, connecting our beginning and our ending. As I wrote nearly a decade ago,
Although your actions add color, weight and strength to the thread of your life, that thread continues to tie you back to your beginnings at birth. As you move through time, your thread is woven together with those of many others to form the tapestry of wyrd. Together, these two basic concepts underscore the connectedness that is at the heart of a Heathen worldview.
The actions of those that came before us shape our wyrd before we are even born. Our own actions affect the wyrd of others, and the actions of others affect ours. Empathy is a natural part of this.
When politicians send officers to arrest a student because they didn’t like an opinion column she wrote for a school newspaper, we empathize with her. We do so not only if we ourselves write columns criticizing politicians (*cough*) but also if we are students, have been students, have students in the family, know students, and love students.
We are aware enough to understand that what is done to her will soon be done to ourselves and those we care about. We know that creeping fascism affects us all, because we are all connected, and what is done to one affects many.
We believe that wyrd weaves us all together, so we empathize with all those connected by the web.
In the rites of ancestor veneration, we honor those that have come before us as we recognize that their deeds shaped the beginnings of our own wyrd. Empathy is also part of this aspect of Ásatrú practice.
By reflecting on the lives of those now gone, by speaking about them during the Ásatrú ritual of blót, we naturally empathize with them, with all their struggles and sacrifices, challenges and achievements. The act of participating in the ritual itself strengthens the sense of empathy.
Empathy for ancestors naturally leads to care for community, because we ourselves and all those we know will someday become ancestors. Over the course of our intertwined lives with our intermixed wyrd, we together form the grounding for those future children whose ancestors we will someday be.
This worldview is not one of isolated individualism but of empathic connection.
From wyrd to ancestor veneration to care for community, Ásatrú theology expands to encompass an ethics of climate change also centered on empathy.
We understand that our actions affect the world around us, that our choices have consequences. We care for the well-being of all people, near and far, because we are all connected. We care for the earth itself, whether we honor her as Jörð or by one of her other names, because we are all dependent upon her even as we care for her.
To practice an earth religion, have empathy for the earth and for all those who live upon her.
Still to be written
Despite what social media algorithms and YouTube videos may tell you, our modern tradition is deeper than wannabe Vikings on the internet would have you believe.
This modern religion is only about a half-century old, and it exists in multiple forms around the world. There is no central authority, no one true catholic church of Odin to which we all belong.
Instead, we have lone practitioners, smaller and larger kindreds, alliances of individuals and kindreds, and some bigger organizations that still remain miniscule in comparison to those of other faith traditions.
We make our own decisions about belief and practice. We choose our own ways to study, interpret, and incorporate the old sources and new scholarship.
There is no holy law that says today’s Ásatrú and Heathenry must mirror the sanguinary practices of the Viking Age, no sacred writ that compels us to view piratic raids of the 800s as divine models for behavior.
We practice a tradition far younger than all the larger religions of the world. Among the newer faiths, it is younger than Mormonism. It is younger than Hare Krishna. It is even younger than Scientology.
Our theologies are not set in stone. The ink is barely dry on the page, and there is much still to be written.
If we want to embrace empathy as a core element of our theology, who can tell us not to?
Certainly not a South African billionaire federal agent.
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