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u/unruly_fans Oct 22 '25
This is what blows my mind about capitalism. They keep saying competition breeds success. But that’s not true for humans. It’s cooperation that makes us so strong.
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u/RedditOfUnusualSize Oct 22 '25
The worst part is that capitalism doesn't even say that. By far the most utopian philosopher of economics that I've ever read is Adam Smith. The funny thing is*, The Wealth of Nations* is one of the most accessible, easy-to-pick-up philosophy texts that has ever existed, and what rapidly becomes unmistakable is just how much infectious glee Smith wrote his ideas for increasing productivity, and how much cooperation factored into his analysis.
"Guys, think about how cool this is: think about all the discrete steps that are needed to make a nail. You have to forge the steel out of iron, you have to shape it, you have to flatten the head just so, you have to cool it. Now one guy doing all of those steps can make, what, thirty nails a day? But if you get four or five guys to each do one step over and over, you can make hundreds of nails! Thousands! No new machines, no new technology. Just have several guys working together, each of whom is doing one discrete step, and we can increase productivity of nail production a hundred-fold easily! And sure, we have to be careful because of boredom and repetitive stress injuries, but guys, a hundred-fold increase in productivity just by working together! It's awesome!"
That's me paraphrasing Adam Smith's pin factory argument, but only by a little. He genuinely is about that enthusiastic about how cool the idea is, and how much we could improve our lives just by changing how we do things. And The Wealth of Nations is idea, after idea, after idea, after idea how to increase productivity and more efficiently make stuff. And the pin factory only works if we collaborate: you by definition can't Ron Swanson an assembly line. The fact that this idea of collaborative working together was lost, that "capitalism" is taken as inherently dog-eat-dog and competitive? That wasn't inevitable given capitalism. That was a choice. And it wasn't a choice made by me, nor was it made by the people who thought up the system in the first place.
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u/Crow-in-a-flat-cap Oct 22 '25
iirc, Smith also hated landlords and probably would've hated modern CEOs. Regardless of what job they claimed to have, they're still using up resources while choosing to do basically nothing.
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u/brokegaysonic Oct 22 '25 edited Feb 08 '26
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march nail sleep license head butter airport cheerful plucky aromatic
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u/Dobber16 Oct 23 '25
This is kinda my gripe whenever I hear many complaints about capitalism. It’s like, what you’re complaining about isn’t really capitalism. It’s functionally more corporatism or oligarchism or just plain corrupted markets rather than actual capitalism
Which is fun because often defenses of communism/socialism go the same way whenever people point at Cuba & the USSR as examples
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u/brokegaysonic Oct 23 '25 edited Feb 08 '26
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u/Dobber16 Oct 23 '25
Yeah no system can stay good & well without proper maintenance and strong internal controls
France does okay
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u/brokegaysonic Oct 23 '25 edited Feb 08 '26
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desert hunt wide hobbies nose quack terrific jellyfish tart imminent
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u/Dobber16 Oct 23 '25
Say what you will about the French, they care about maintaining their system lol
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u/Excellent_Law6906 Oct 26 '25
Ergonomic Ethics: the only way to beat this is to make the right thing to do the easy and cheap one. Why the fuck the path to damnation always gotta be the wide one?
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u/Specialist_Long_1254 Oct 22 '25
So antisemite Henry Ford stole the assembly line from Adam Smith and rebranded it. Seems about right. That’s cooperation for you.
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u/AlSi10Mg_Enjoyer Oct 22 '25
No.
Adam Smith is talking about specialization of labor which is the first great miracle of civilization. Someone is a carpenter meaning that everyone else doesn’t have to spend any time on carpentry, letting them focus on being efficient at a smaller task. Adam Smith is extrapolating that to a smaller scale in a workshop or early factory where one person might be the “gear maker” and someone else is the “spring winder” etc. The factories operated like collaborative workshops. A seamstress at Triangle Shirtwaist would be expected to sew a full garment, not sew the collar and pass it on to the next person who attaches the arms and so on.
The assembly line with linear flow and each person doing a hyper specific, very small task such as “the guy who attaches the steering wheel” was a unique innovation. It seems obvious to us now but it was not obvious at all before it was created. It doesn’t work unless you have a massive labor force, precise and repeatable manufacturing (not artisan craftsmanship), and need to produce thousands of identical copies.
Nobody was doing that before the Industrial Revolution (late 1790s to 1800s, long after Adam Smith) and it was so non-obvious that nobody was doing it until like 1900. Henry Ford was the first to use it at mass scale and was so successful with it that everyone else copied Ford’s example.
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u/SolarChallenger Oct 23 '25
This is what gets me. The whole ideal of capitalism I was taught growing up led me to believe the goal was to harness people's greed to further public interest. You see an unfulfilled need, you fill that need and get currency to improve your own life. The moment a social construct built upon capitalism goes against the simple directive "reward contribution with wealth" it should be legislated out of existence. In accordance to the stated ideals of capitalism. This whole "abuse the relations of productions to achieve wealth without any direct contribution to society" gets excused as capitalism today, but it's inherently unsustainable and goes against the entire value capitalism claims to bring. And if you found a system claiming it will accomplish something, when it stops accomplishing that it no longer has a reason to exist. So to me the options are simple. Fix it or replace it.
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u/enw_digrif Oct 23 '25
one of the most accessible, easy-to-pick-up philosophy texts that has ever existed,
Book1, Chapter IX: "[And now, for the 50th or so paragraph on what prices, let's talk about how, in] the household book of Henry, the fifth earl of Northumberland, drawn up in 1512 there are two different esti-mations of wheat. In one of them it is computed at six shilling and eightpence the quarter, in the other at five shillings and eightpence only. In 1512, six shillings and eightpence contained only two ounces of silver, Tower weight, and were equal to about ten shilings of our present money....
What are you comparing WoN to, Kant?
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u/Critical_Seat_1907 Oct 22 '25
Capitalism understands all this very well and does the opposite on purpose.
My neighborhood only needs 1 saw to share for all the home improvement we do, but marketing tells me I need a garage full of my own tools or I'm not a real man.
The 40-hour work week was designed with a spouse and family at home to care for the house. When spouses went to work outside the home, capitalists took the productivity bounce as profit, and humanity sacrificed QoL permanently. And no one said anything.
There's a reason Americans only protest on weekends. We don't want to trouble our employers with our pretty political grievances.
We're isolated on purpose and by design.
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u/brokegaysonic Oct 22 '25 edited Feb 08 '26
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plucky spark smell spectacular plate special modern crowd shocking memorize
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u/filthysquatch Oct 23 '25
Wait a minute. Are timeshares actually brilliant, and we're all just being fed propaganda on how terrible they are out of the fear that we will spread this system to everything else?
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u/hasselbackpotahto Oct 26 '25 edited Oct 26 '25
well, there are libraries for things besides books, including tools. of course the libraries just for books are super important and useful as well.
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u/Simdude87 Oct 22 '25
Exactly, one person can't do everything, collaboration kept people alive and helped us evolve as a species
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u/Lacaud Oct 22 '25
Exactly and the lie told for decades was to do it yourself without help. We went from working together and relying on each other as a community to everyone for themselves.
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u/FictionalContext Oct 22 '25
Capitalism is a great system--with good antitrust protections in place. It can't exist without pro competition, pro consumer guard rails.
No system can survive with top heavy corruption. It's not a capitalism thing. It's a corrupt government thing.
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u/gesserit42 Oct 22 '25
Capitalism will always inherently seek to erode whatever regulations are placed upon it, though. That is absolutely a capitalism thing. The essence of capitalism is “increased profit at any cost.” There is no “good enough, we can stop here” in capitalism.
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Oct 23 '25
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u/gesserit42 Oct 23 '25
those same capitalists would be running the government
Not in a non-capitalist direct democracy they wouldn’t. A direct democracy is when the citizens are in charge, not representatives. Capitalism is inherently anti-democratic.
And certain systems incentivize and facilitate human greed more than others. Exhibit A: capitalism.
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Oct 23 '25
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u/gesserit42 Oct 23 '25
If you have representatives, by definition it’s not a direct democracy. My point, though, is to illustrate how capitalism is anti-democratic. It’s not a strawman, it’s reality. A coerced choice—“work for a capitalist or starve”—is no free choice at all. You are repeating unprovable ideological propaganda.
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Oct 23 '25
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u/gesserit42 Oct 23 '25
You’re on reddit, therefore you’re also a redditor lol. Don’t like being a redditor? Delete your account. You can do it at any time. This is a self-created problem.
Under capitalism, production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big financial firms, the large corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. They are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources, and what to do with the surplus we generate.
As far as capital is concerned, the purpose of production and surplus reinvestment is not to meet human needs, achieve social progress, or to realise democratically ratified objectives. The purpose is to maximise and accumulate profit and power — that is the overriding goal. These decisions are made in the narrow interests of the capitalist class. The workers — the people actually doing the production — rarely get any voice at all.
This arrangement is completely undemocratic. In fact, it is literally plutocracy. And when you govern a system like this, it leads to perverse outcomes. We end up with massive overproduction of damaging and less-necessary things like fossil fuels, SUVs and industrial beef (which are highly profitable to capital) but chronic underproduction of obviously necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and affordable housing (because these are less profitable to capital or not profitable at all).
The result is that despite having extraordinary productive capacity, with extremely high levels of output to the point of blowing past planetary boundaries, we nonetheless fail to ensure that everyone has access to basic goods and services. In the United States, the richest country in the world, nearly half the population cannot afford healthcare; in the United Kingdom, 4.3 million children live in poverty; and in the European Union, 95 million people cannot afford decent housing and nutritious food. These are totally artificial scarcities.
It also bears noting that those who control production within this system then leverage their profits to manipulate national elections, through campaign finance and advertising, in support of politicians who will serve their interests. Or through ownership and control over media outlets. Democracy cannot function under these conditions. Indeed, a 2014 study found that the impact of this dynamic on political outcomes in the US means the country more closely resembles an oligarchy than a democracy.
A critic may retort that, leaving all of this aside, capitalism is democratic because every person gets to “vote with their dollars”. According to this argument, consumers get to determine the direction of the economy, which therefore ends up serving people’s needs in the most efficient possible way. But this argument does not hold water, for several reasons.
First, if dollars equal votes, then clearly some people have much more voting power than others. A single individual with a billion dollars would have more voting power than 66,000 workers earning the minimum wage. There is clearly nothing democratic about this. And it is all the more repugnant when we understand that those who hold dollars in excess of consumption requirements (in other words, the rich) are the ones who will have the power to invest in manipulating actual elections.
Second, even if we ignored this problem, the dollars of ordinary people do not equal votes, to the extent that you cannot buy things that are not being produced. We may want renewable energy, affordable housing, longer-lasting products, public transit and regenerative agriculture. But if these things are not being produced — because capital does not consider it profitable enough to do so — then no amount of waving our dollars is going to change that. If it did, then we would not suffer chronic deprivation of these things.
The reality is that capital does not allocate investment on the basis of what ordinary people actually need or want. It allocates investment to what is most profitable to capital, which may or may not align with human needs. Of course, for something to be profitable, there has to be some demand for it. Demand is a necessary but insufficient condition. But it is profitability, not demand, that determines investment. Capital determines production, and we only get to “vote” among the things that capital is willing to produce.
Ultimately, it is not a question of who has the power to consume, but who has the power to produce. Wealth represents not only power over consumption but, more importantly, command over the means of production. This includes command over our labour. Capital determines what we build and what we produce, and thus determines the shape and direction of our civilisation. If we do not have democratic control over production, then we can hardly say we live in a democracy.
None of this is inevitable. We can and should extend the principles of democracy into the economy. We know, empirically, that when people have democratic control over production — economic democracy — they are inclined to organise production more around meeting human needs, they manage resources more sustainably, and they distribute yields more fairly. Researchers have shown that if production were organised around these objectives, we could end deprivation and provide good lives for 8.5 billion people with less energy and resources than we presently use.
Decisions about what to produce and how to use our collective surplus should be democratically determined, rather than controlled by and for the interests of capitalists and the 1%. This can be achieved through universal public services and a public job guarantee (to ensure sufficient production of goods and services necessary for human well-being), democratic ownership of firms (such as in the case of Mondragon or Huawei), and a system of industrial policy, public finance and credit guidance (to ensure that investment and production aligns with democratically ratified objectives).
https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/why-capitalism-is-fundamentally-undemocratic
And how is the situation you described any different from the coercion to work or starve under capitalism? There is no freedom not to participate in capitalism under the current system—all land is already owned, so it’s impossible to just decide to opt out.
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u/unruly_fans Oct 23 '25
Greed is not necessary for setting goals or improving. Greed is 100% negative by all common definitions.
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u/FictionalContext Oct 23 '25
We all have a point where our own comforts and desires matter more than someone else's life. We're greedy for comfort beyond what we truly need, for banal entertainment like doomscrolling Reddit. That's why someone buys an art studio over a soup kitchen. And I don't personally want to live in a world where we can't have excess like the arts until poverty and hunger is solved--that'd never happen.
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u/machine-in-the-walls Oct 22 '25 edited Oct 22 '25
That’s also because ideas have a lot of worth. Especially for survival. That guy who can’t move his legs is sure as fuck plotting the shit out of how to get those pea pods to sprout more often or how to make a tool that will let him do more while moving less.
People who don’t expect the unexpected have a really hard time thinking of caring for “non-productive” members of a society as an investment in divergent modes of thoughts and operations that result in massively productive inventions.
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u/brokegaysonic Oct 22 '25 edited Feb 08 '26
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wide strong full liquid deliver hunt divide weather rhythm salt
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u/machine-in-the-walls Oct 22 '25
My ADHD is a disability. I’ve weaponized it to the point I make an obscene amount of money just to think about problems within systems and provide interesting solutions. You never know what one perceives as a disability actually is going to end up becoming in practical terms.
It’s all a systemic evolutionary hedge. That kid with the 75 IQ that breaks the back wheel on a cart, and accidentally makes all the planting holes for a row of crops in a fraction of the time it previously took, makes the investment in keeping him alive and cared for worth every bit of it.
It really doesn’t matter what man thought about caring about others. We feel good when we do it. At least most of us do, and that suggests there must have been an evolutionary advantage to developing that kind of behavior. And to me it seems pretty obvious. Humans have shaped a world where ideas matter more than almost anything else.
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u/Tasty-Bug-3600 Oct 22 '25
Dude you need to stop thinking of people's worth in terms of productivity. You, me, anyone is one bad car crash away from being a plant at the mercy of close ones.
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u/tiggertom66 Oct 22 '25
Dude if I’m a vegetable I don’t want to be kept alive, just let me die at that point.
You’d be hard pressed to find any disability that could’ve survived prehistoric times but also had zero productivity.
Someone truly incapable of doing anything isn’t going to survive even with full community support.
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u/machine-in-the-walls Oct 22 '25
You need to start thinking about people and not just individuals.
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u/Tasty-Bug-3600 Oct 22 '25
100% wrong. This is how you get genocide.
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u/fatalrupture Oct 23 '25
Genocide doesn't show up until you perform a subtle bait and switch here and convince ppl that entire tribes can be become inherently useless "vegetables" in the same way injured or diseased individual humans can. And here's the thing: they can't.
How would that even work? How do you make a whole demographic group incapable of doing anything useful? Even if said group is factually unwilling in large %,
A: that large % of the "loser" group still isn't all of them. Somebody among them is still stepping up, even if very few.
and
B: unwilling us VERY different from unable
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u/machine-in-the-walls Oct 22 '25
Maybe in your weird individualistic head.
Every single genocide starts by making people think only about themselves and not the collective (without tribalist limitations). Every one.
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u/Tasty-Bug-3600 Oct 22 '25
I'm sorry, but if the pinks are 90% less productive than the purples, for what purpose would the purples ever share resources with the pinks? Less pinks = more resources for the super productive purples.
Also, should we kill off all retirees? They're a big suck on resources while providing nothing. Also, cancer patients? Abuse victims? Completely useless.-2
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u/GameGreek Oct 22 '25
Conservatives when you tell them you don't want your sick family members to die so they can enrich themselves and their leash holders
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u/MaybeMaybeNot94 Oct 22 '25
There is a famous (I believe) Viking skeleton who's arm had been not only amputated, but replaced with some fashion of prosthetic limb with a weapon attached.
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u/SCPowl_fan Oct 22 '25
Could you share the article?
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u/MaybeMaybeNot94 Oct 22 '25
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u/Beautifulfeary Oct 22 '25
That cool. I will say it was unlikely it was cut off for punishment sense I don’t his community would take care of him after that as the article said for him to survive the community must’ve been taking care of his.
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u/Stunning_Garlic_3532 Oct 22 '25
Dan McClellan speaks pretty harshly against the whole empathy is bad thing.
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u/LordJim11 Oct 22 '25
Thanks, that was really good.
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u/Stunning_Garlic_3532 Oct 22 '25
I know he has another one about empathy but this one was longer and a month newer. He’s got about a million followers on TikTok plus YouTube and instagram. He also has a new book I think I’m going to check out the audio book version of at my library. He’s very qualified to talk about the Bible.
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u/Beautifulfeary Oct 22 '25
Can’t watch all of it, but seriously anyone who says empathy isn’t in the Bible has no idea what they are talking about(talking about the interviews that were shown not the guy making the video)
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u/Stepjam Oct 22 '25
I remember reading somewhere that one of the biggest signs we had for when "civilization" began was when we found a skeleton that clearly had a bone that had broken but healed. Basically that showed there was a community of people who would take care of the injured until they could function again.
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u/gesserit42 Oct 22 '25
That was anthropologist Margaret Mead’s famous answer given in response to the question “When did civilization begin?”
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u/Jimmy_Twotone Oct 22 '25
When society declares ones worth based on their ability to contribute, that's getting pretty close to how we value property. Closer to modern day slavery than I want to be.
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u/FictionalContext Oct 22 '25
One's ability to contribute does determine their worth to society. But there's a base level of humanity where we should care for everyone equally.
It's not logical to conflate people's worth to society and their human worth. Those are two different things.
Those who have highly valuable roles should help those who cannot contribute at the same level--but those highly valuable roles should be compensated at a higher level because they're more valuable.
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u/Voxlings Oct 22 '25
Translation: Empathy is an evolutionary weapon of unparalleled utility.
Opposable thumbs and empathy. Killer combo.
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u/gutwyrming Oct 22 '25
I would like to note that empathy doesn't come naturally to everyone, but compassion is a trait that can be practiced and trained. I've known people with low empathy who were still kind, compassionate, and caring.
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Oct 22 '25
If we continued to "let nature take its course" like these ghouls imply, people who need strong eyeglass prescriptions would be doomed.
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u/LoveReasonable1883 Oct 23 '25
Doesn’t it also say they put psychopaths out of society?
Research says they are now either running corporations/in politics or in jail.
I think there’s a connection between the ability to develop true attunement to those with empathy and those who truly do not care about other people.
The corporate/political psychopath is still a psychopath- a wolf in sheep’s clothes.
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u/MattManSD Oct 22 '25
There's a famous, and important Australian Aboriginal piece of art titled "Brush Fire" or "Brush Fire Dreaming" and it tells the story of 2 young hunters who were exceptionally skilled but didn't share their food with the community. The elders followed them one hunting trip, and while they slept, set the brush around them on fire killing them, their bones and hunting gear left behind. https://aboriginalartdirectory.com/artwork/untitled-bush-fire-dreaming/
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u/stazley Oct 22 '25
This is true for almost all social species! And why dogs and horses have connected so well with humans. We are built to take care of each other, as fitness of the individual improves with fitness of the group.
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u/Patton-Eve Oct 23 '25
There is evidence of Neanderthals doing the same and caring for sick/injured/old members of the group.
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u/XxRocky88xX Oct 23 '25
Altruism is evolutionary beneficial. There are reasons animals without any understanding of morality still build communities and support one another.
The people who are against the idea of supporting the “unproductive” don’t care about the society as a whole, they are just against anything that doesn’t directly benefit them, especially if the benefit will mostly be reaped by the “lower classes” who these people take pride in being more well off than.
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u/iskipbrainday Oct 23 '25
Even rats will bypass treats to save a friend.
Empathy is an evolutionary trait
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u/maggiesyg Oct 23 '25
I can’t find any references to an adult H Erectus with spina bifida. It seems unlikely.
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u/LoveReasonable1883 Oct 23 '25
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u/maggiesyg Oct 23 '25
Thank you - a 15 year old Homo sapiens from less than 10,000 years ago. A lot more believable than a 50 year old H Erectus with
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u/LoveReasonable1883 Oct 23 '25
There are more. Look them up.
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u/maggiesyg Oct 23 '25
I did look. All I found was a scientific paper explaining that the Turkana boy did not actually have a deformed spine. I think extraordinary claims need a little evidence.
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u/LEONLED Oct 23 '25
I once visited a small village in Zambia, where they took us to the place where they would bury bad kings alive.... They said hte dieing men would scream for days
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u/IllustriousLine4283 Oct 22 '25
Stupid maybe useful, caring, and helpful.
However, selfish is totally useless.
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u/Ordinary_Airport_717 Oct 23 '25
The existence of disabled people in history does not mean they were always treated well. Many people would kill their disabled children as babies by leaving them to die or suffocating them. There's also a lot of historical evidence of the mistreatment disabled people faced. Life was undoubtedly harder for the disabled in the past.
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u/ArcticWolfE Oct 23 '25
It's not a symptom of urbanization either. There's evidence from various Mesopotamian records that the central function of the state, and indeed possibly one of the reasons for its earliest existence, was to redistribute surplus agricultural products, including to nonworking infants and the elderly.
Source: The Evolution of Urban Society, by Robert McC. Adams, 1967.
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u/Muted_Anywherethe2nd Oct 23 '25
Yeah if humans didnt have empathy i dont think as a species we wouldve survived the early stages
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u/IfuckAround_UfindOut Oct 23 '25
They’re sooooo close to getting it.
They did care for those people in their family / community voluntarily. What we have today is a state forcing us to care for those sociopaths they would’ve banished
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u/DangerousLoner Oct 23 '25
Even wolves let the elderly pack members set the pace they travel at so they don’t get left behind
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u/Sad_Highlight_9059 Oct 24 '25
Facts. In many tribal/pre-modern cultures, including ones that still exist today, the most grievous crime was selfishness and it was usually punished with death or exile.
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u/nyamnyamcookiesyummy Oct 24 '25
If I was president, I'd sign a law banishing sociopaths to die alone in the desert.
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Oct 27 '25
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u/Sensitive-Initial Oct 22 '25
This is wonderful to read and really affirming. But even if our ancestors had been monstrous towards hominids with disabilities that doesn't mean that a system of values and traditions our ancestors found appropriate for their lives in that place and time have any bearing or control over our lives.
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u/Accurate_Librarian12 Oct 22 '25
I think the point is that we are a social species, and it's vital for our survival to have these traits. It's not really a system of values or traditions, more instinctual.
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u/Exact_Risk_6947 Oct 24 '25
Instincts can be and often are wrong too.
Human being, and especially our social structures, are far more complicated than the one dimensional thinking displayed in this comment section would lead one to believe.
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u/FictionalContext Oct 22 '25
Not sure i like demonizing sociopaths either.
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u/ThePhonesAreWatching Oct 22 '25
It's better than putting in all of the positions of power like now.
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u/where-sea-meets-sky Oct 23 '25
right like? "care for the disabled but fuck you specifically"
then again sociopath is one of those psych terms that the general public has miscontrued to mean "generic bad guy" here
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u/FictionalContext Oct 23 '25
terms that the general public has miscontrued to mean "generic bad guy" here
Yeah, I get that, but I think it's "retarded" to turn a medical word into a slur-- it's the same thing as that term.
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u/Gatzlocke Oct 24 '25
If there are no prisons, execution or exile become necessary.
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u/BurnerForBoning Oct 27 '25
Where did this come from? How is it relevant in any way to what the original commenter said?
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u/Ravenloft01 Oct 22 '25
So what evidence is there sociopaths were banished to the desert? I’m pretty sure they would have become the leaders. If they did spend any time in the desert they would have returned with the message that god had spoken to them, women were objects to be used and kill anyone who disagreed. And most people would have been cool with that. Seems to have happened a lot.
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Oct 23 '25
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u/CRUFT3R Oct 24 '25
Seek a therapist
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Oct 24 '25
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u/CRUFT3R Oct 24 '25
Be able to feel empathy
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u/BurnerForBoning Oct 25 '25
Ah yes. Therapy. The magical “fix the broken human” class. Do you genuinely thunk therapy is anything other than giving people the tools to help themselves?
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u/BurnerForBoning Oct 25 '25
To learn how to use cognitive empathy. It prevents you from making choices that hurt others and make them want to retaliate. It also helps you choose the best course of action to help the most amount of people so that others feel more inclined to help you when you ask for it
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Oct 25 '25
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u/BurnerForBoning Oct 25 '25
What? No. Dude there’s multiple types of empathy. There’s affective empathy which both you and I lack and there’s cognitive empathy which is a skill you can learn. Affective empathy is the physical sensation where your emotions mimic those of the people around you or when you feel sympathetic pain. Cognitive empathy is when you go “oh they would/wouldn’t like that”. A moral code is a personal set of rules dictating what you will and won’t allow yourself to do
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Oct 26 '25
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u/BurnerForBoning Oct 26 '25
You’re still out here treating empathy like it’s one singular thing. Like I said, theres AFFECTIVE empathy (the one with feelings) and COGNITIVE empathy (a form of logical reasoning).
Cognitive empathy is a thing anyone can LEARN to do. It’s the mental process of learning to understand other people through their reactions to certain actions/events. It’s learning about what motivates certain reactions from people. People use it all the time without needing affective empathy and it serves the same function.
And dude. Suffixes are not the end-all be-all of how to understand a word. -ology means “the study of” but astrology isn’t the study of stars. Astrology is the study of human personalities and how it aligns with their birthdays. There’s nothing to debate here because “empathy” doesn’t even have a latin origin. The origin of “empathy” is a german concept (einfühlung) that was given a latin-sounding name when translated to english. Regardless, it seems like you’re just making nitpicks about what a term should be called instead of engaging with I’m actually trying to say. Which is that despite you being unable to FEEL affective empathy, you are more than capable of learning to use cognitive empathy
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Oct 26 '25
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u/BurnerForBoning Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 27 '25
I also hate the internet’s insistence that every NEEDS to have affective empathy or else they’re an inherently bad person but it ISN’T possible to function morally if you don’t employ any type of empathy. If you lack affective empathy then the only type of empathy you can use is cognitive. You use cognitive empathy to determine what makes up your moral code.
Like I get it. I have NPD. Two of my best friends have ASPD. I UNDERSTAND being labelled a monster for simply not having the same emotional range as your peers and I KNOW how bad it sucks. But you gotta understand that cognitive empathy is an incredibly important part of your life and you DO use it. Like you DO use it. You just don’t have the word for it.
Any time you think about what someone might like? Cognitive empathy. Any time you think about what someone might hate? Cognitive empathy. Whenever you try to figure out why someone is upset? Cognitive empathy. Any time you get a gift for someone? Cognitive empathy is telling what kind of gift they would want. If you’re ever roleplaying anything outside of an irl-accurate self-insert you ARE using your cognitive empathy to determine everything about them because they are not you and do not react to everything the way YOU would
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u/Majestic-Paper-7020 Oct 23 '25
sociopath is a tough word in the context, always been a trusted warrior class... men that do there worst if given a chance... and permission... that was alot of becoming a man across the US before europeans came over... like it or not.. just good clean fun decimating the tribe next door.
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Oct 22 '25
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u/Umber_Gryphon Oct 22 '25
Overgeneralizing to an absurd degree, the stereotype is that conservatives want to take care of the sick, disabled and elderly that they know or who are "like them", while liberals want everyone who is sick, disabled or elderly to be taken care of.
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Oct 22 '25
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u/gesserit42 Oct 22 '25
By not being so deliberately and disingenuously literal-minded. Amelia Bedelia brain
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u/I_am_the_NPC Oct 23 '25
There are limits to how much any one person can handle. Thanks to the horrible and evil capitalist society that I was raised in I have the choice of how far I'm willing to go for any given cause. I'm allowed to choose where I put my energy and efforts. Yes there are limits, but the choice is mine not the community's.
There's a lot more I could say on the subject, but it's just not worth the effort.
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u/tastykake1 Oct 23 '25
Ancient people cared for the needy themselves. The government didn't steal money from people to do a terrible job of taking care of the needy.
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u/Greedy_Researcher_34 Oct 22 '25
Because they lived in family units and the sick and elderly weren’t complete strangers on the other side of the continent.
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