(Answer at the end).
EMPATHY
By Charles Kocian
While the killing of thousands of children continues in Gaza, Elon Musk writes in Twitter (X) “Amplify Empathy”. I completely agree, but I would add: “Objective Justice”. Have Palestinians been treated with justice the last 70 years? Shame on me! I admit I never studied its history in detail until now, and it is said that the Devil is in the details. We cannot live without judging. We say: “this is good; this is bad; this person is innocent, this other is a criminal”. To judge is to think, but we need to discover the details of scientific facts. Are you listening UN? Hypocrites! You evade article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that say all men are born equal! You incompetent rulers of the XXI century! You are a viper’s nest leading humanity to a nuclear Armageddon! Shame on you!
What happened in the Renaissance? Was the Spanish Inquisition a gang of psychopaths too?
The Spanish Inquisition was a judicial institution. Judicial? Yes, but their judgement was based in false premises, and… bad faith. Its public purpose was to combat heresy, but in private they use it to consolidate the geopolitical power of the Spanish kingdom. Justice? Well… their psychopath methods led them to burn alive men and women. But at least, and to my knowledge, they never killed little children in cold blood. In October of 2023, Netanyahu’s Israel State killed more than 4,000 children in Gaza. The pilots dropped huge bombs over big buildings killing everybody inside. My Jews friends condemns Zionism ideology and say that Israel is a fascist government that don’t represent them.
The rulers of ancient Greece had little empathy too? Yes.
In ancient Greece the common fate of a conquered city was its massacre, like it happened to Melos that was destroyed in 416 BC by another Greek State. The destruction of an entire community, or genocide, was legitimate in certain circumstances for the Greeks. GENOCIDE, in accordance to the UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of the 9th of December of 1948, defines it as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, killing its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to its members and its physical destruction.
The hipocresy and lack of empathy of the UN goes to the roof when you know that, at the same time and in the same year, the massacre of NAKBA occurred in Palestine. What a disgusting double standard! What a moral shame!
Going back to ancient Greece, the sack and destruction of Troy is the most famous. Written by Homer and numerous later poets Troy is completely burned. It was a genocide because the intention to destroy a national group as such existed. The Greeks called it “anastasis”, meaning ‘raising up’, i.e. forcing an unharmed population to leave its territory or be executed or enslaved. In those days cities were ‘razed to the ground’. In Babylonian poems and the Bible, victorious soldiers were encouraged to kill adults by the sword, children beaten to death and foetuses ripped from their mother’s wombs. Even the mildest form of anastasis (turning the original citizens into refugees) today is considered by the UN as a genocide. When it comes to Gaza, it’s clear that Washington have shown cognitive dissonance and functional-self-deception but, if that is not true, then it is pure and blatant dishonesty of a gang of psycopaths.
CONCLUSION
Benign-selfishness, benign-self-interest or benign-egoism is when a person acts to gain its own pleasure, but without initiating force or deceit to others, that is, maintaining empathy. Justice is the rule of free trade, the win-win deal everybody likes. Is Palestine or Israel practicing “benign-selfishness”. When somebody steal, kill or deceive it initiates force or deception and that is immoral. Who are the immoral actors in this conflict that has lasted more than 70 years? In one hand, I encourage the reader to make its own research and put especial attention to the historic details. In the other hand, I suggest to read “The Virtue of Selfishness” by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, an expert psychologist in self-esteem.
Today we listen “From the river to the sea Palestine should be free”. Indeed, but why not a democracy where Jews and Palestinians can prosper together in the same land? Is it possible for them to discover “benign selfishness”? Yes, but there is a problem: the storytelling of the sacred books (like the Old Testament of the Bible). Although those stories give identity to the people who believe in them, not all humanity believe in them. But today the Bible stories put humanity at risk because Israel will use its nuclear weapons “if it’s their God’s will”. Will Allah agree with YHWH or they will kill each other and end civilization? Will they end like “The Strongest” in the Wild Tales movie? So, who can help us to survive this evolution challenge of our species? Do you guess?
Yes, the hero is Darwin and the tool is “natural selection”! Natural selection happens when some organisms adapt to their environment. The environment in this case is cultural: the premises of sacred books. These are embedded in the cultural imprinting process when children absorb their premises without critical thinking. Can the scholars of sacred books upgrade their storytelling with more empathic premises and characters? For instance, wouldn’t be great to read a Bible were God says that all men are born equal and there is no chosen people? It is obvious that sacred storytelling was used in ancient times for cultural and geopolitical reasons, in Babylon, Greece and Judea. But that makes no sense to the new generation of young people.
Today we live in the era of information, in the era of microchips and Internet. Dinosaurs sacred storytelling books need to be changed or we are all going to be vaporized in a global Hiroshima. And if everybody dies, Allah, YHWH will also die, because there will be nobody to remember them. So, it’s time for man to be its own rational-God and practice empathy, benign-selfishness and reason.
Eudaimonia for all is possible and a New Renaissance is probable if we dare to use our critical thinking apparatus with loving kindness to become philosophers. Or we do it or we all die.
Now the answer to question 77.
QUESTION N° 77
Is “benign selfishness” morally inferior to altruism?
a) Yes.
b) No.
The answer is: a) No. Benign selfishness is morally superior to altruism, and the latter is not empathy. Altruism is not empathy, but a moral doctrine that supports the distribution of goods without respecting the merits of individual property rights.
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