Ben Shapiro declares that empathy is “bad for politics”
Published
Citation From the July 24, 2020, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): So Morgan Freeman led off the season with a bizarre, meaningless video about empathy. Because, of course, the implication is that if you disagree with kneeling for America's systemic racism, you are not empathetic. Right? That is the goal of this particular video.
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Ok, there's only one problem, ok? Empathy is actually kind of bad for politics. The reason that empathy is bad for politics is because it leads you to empathize with people that you are more likely to like as opposed to people you don't like. Ok, so first of all, the pitch for empathy is actually -- there have been several books that are written on this, social science books, talking about how empathy is not actually the best thing for politics. It, actually, almost deactivates the reasoning centers of your brain. Because when you're empathetic, you don't actually create good policy. This doesn't mean that feeling sympathy for people is a bad thing. It means that if empathy is what drives your policy-making, you're probably not acting in a rational fashion.
But the real goal here, of course, is not to generate empathy. The real goal here is to suggest that if you disagree with the idea that America is systemically and institutionally racist, you are not an empathetic person, and therefore you are a bad, cruel, and callous person. The idea is that empathy is really about -- it's really a moral statement about what a good person you are. And you can't watch baseball until you say it along with Morgan Freeman. You can't. You can't just watch a game and be distracted, which is the goal of sports.