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hannah arendt
Why Elon Musk Is Wrong About Empathy
History has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbor is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbor thrives.
Mar 21, 2025
“The fundamental weakness is empathy,” Elon Musk recently told radio podcast host Joe Rogan. “There is a bug, which is the empathy response.”
As Musk has established himself as at least the second most powerful person in an administration seeking a wholesale remaking of institutions, rules, and norms, what he said matters, because it encapsulates a political plan. What the Project 2025 report set out in over 900 turgid pages, Musk’s remark captures in a simple pithy mantra for the social media age.
And as (let us acknowledge it) the Trump revolution is currently popular with at least large parts of the U.S. electorate, and some overseas too, what Musk said summarizes also the worldview of a social-cultural moment and movement on the march.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away, “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.”
Core to the argument against empathy is the claim that ethical and practical considerations run counter to each other. The guardrails of rules and norms about caring for others, it argues, don’t only hold us back, they tie our hands behind our back.
Morality is for losers, it suggests, and who wants to lose? Only when we cut ourselves free of the burden of looking after and looking out for others, it posits, can we soar. The practical applications of this worldview are all encompassing.
They include the ripping up of international cooperation; the gutting of life-saving programs for people in poverty abroad and at home; and the violating of due process for protestors, prisoners, migrants, minorities, and anyone (who can be made to be) unpopular. That’s not how it ends, that’s how it starts.
A collapse of empathy would be an existential threat to the world. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on her witness to, and escape from, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, concluded, “The death of empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” The stakes are too high for us to fail.
So how can we respond to the argument against empathy?
One way would be to stick only to ethics, arguing, simply, “it is our duty to sacrifice for others, and failing to do so is just wrong!” This has driven what has come to be known as the charity narrative.
This approach seems like a flawed strategy because by refusing to engage in the practicality conversation, it concedes it to the cynics and nihilists, accepting the framing of morality as a kind of self-immolation that brings only noble suffering and that cares only about stances, not consequences.
Another way would be to give up on ethics, and make only the most selfish arguments for doing good, like “we should not show ourselves to be unreliable because that would get us knocked off the top perch by our rivals when we must be Number One!” This too seems like a flawed strategy because it reinforces variations of dog-eat-dog as the only frames for success.
What both of those approaches get wrong is that they accept the frame that ethics and practicality are separate. Older wisdoms have long understood them as inseparable. What can in current debates seem like a rivalrous relationship between “what is good?” and “what is smart?”, or “what is moral?” and “what is wise?”, we often find when we look more deeply is not.
That often, the way in which societies developed moral principles was that they are ways to abstract what people have learnt from experience works. When, for example, people say in the African principle of Ubuntu “I am because you are,” that is not just a moral or theological point, it is literally true.
It is what public health teaches us: that I am healthy because my neighbour is healthy. (Even Musk was forced to concede to public pressure on this with his partial admission that “with USAID, one of the things we cancelled, accidentally, was Ebola prevention, and I think we all want Ebola prevention.”
Fearful of the reaction to his initial cancellation of Ebola prevention, he even claimed, falsely, to have fixed that “mistake” straight away, but what matters here is that the case against Ebola prevention collapsed so fast because interdependence was so quickly understood.)
So too, history has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbor is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbor thrives. Perhaps, for oligarchs, a ruthless, rule-less, world can work. (Perhaps not, however, when the fall-out comes between the “two bros.”)
But for the 99.9% of us, as John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” We are interdependent and inseparable. Alone we are weak, but together we are strong. Or, as the brilliant bleak joke of old ascribed to Benjamin Franklin put it, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.”
The mutual interest argument, which highlights to people “we each have a stake in the well-being of all, looking out for others is not losing,” does not take us away from values, it reinforces them.
“There is an interrelated structure of reality. We are all tied in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” That was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and yet he was making an argument that you could say is the argument of mutual interest.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away, “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.” Interdependence, as a practical frame, reflects on the situation of that person, and comes through that reflection to understand that “I need to connect, as that could next time be me.”
Morality and wisdom guide us in the same direction; and as the fastest way there is empathy, that makes empathy not humanity’s weakness but our superpower.
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Today's Social Media Are No Longer Safe for Journalism
This existential moment calls for a global social media platform for independent news media.
Mar 21, 2025
Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist who studied totalitarian regimes, noted in 1974 that “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?”
Fifty years later, we have nearly reached that moment. This is existential for all independent (i.e., not allied with a political party or authoritarian regime) news organizations and their ability to reach audiences in the social media space.
Social media like Twitter (now X) and Facebook became important environments for the news media to enter two decades ago because they are where millions of people congregate online. For journalism organizations, the goal has been to post interesting stories and get referrals—those users who click through to the news site and boost web page views.
Yet, that relationship has fallen apart. Ultimately, tech companies are not interested in helping journalism or aiding civil discourse. The annual Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism digital news report for 2025 notes “big falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) over the last two years.”
The even bigger problem for independent news media is that most social media platforms are increasingly antithetical to freedom of the press.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and turned it into X, it’s become the disinformation-drenched social platform of the Donald Trump administration. This year, genuflecting to Trump, Meta (corporate parent of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) announced it would drop its independent fact-checking program in the U.S. in favor of an anemic, crowd-sourced “community notes” system, which has already been a failure at X. Another popular news platform, TikTok, has serious disinformation problems, security liabilities and an uncertain future.
Several news organizations around the globe decided they won’t take it anymore. NPR stopped posting on X in 2023, after the platform insisted on designating it as “U.S. state-affiliated media.” More recently, The Guardian announced it would stop posting on X, concluding it is “a toxic media platform.” Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish newspaper of record, Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, and La Vanguardia, the leading newspaper in Barcelona, quit X, too. The European Federation of Journalists, representing about 320,000 journalists, did the same. “We cannot continue to participate in feeding the social network of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists,” EFJ president Maja Sever wrote.
But, simply quitting X only eliminates the worst option and settles for the slightly less bad options that remain.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind. For example, 54% of Americans get their news often or sometimes from social media. Adults 18-29 are the heaviest users of social media platforms. They deserve a social media platform that respects and informs them.
That’s why legitimate news media should band together and regain the autonomy they ceded to third-party social media. Independent news organizations–large and small–should cooperatively create and control their own social media platform that amplifies news and public information, encourages links to member news organizations, and excludes misinformation and disinformation.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things.
The model for this is something almost as old as modern journalism, too: The Associated Press, an international cooperative nonprofit news agency. As the AP tells its founding story, “In 1846, five New York City newspapers funded a pony express route through Alabama to bring news of the Mexican War north faster than the U.S. Post Office could deliver it.” The problem with social media is similar–if it’s not working, work collectively to build another way. And, like the AP, it could be a global cooperative.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things. But, a news-controlled social media platform could develop features that would demonstrate the multimedia ability of news organizations and enable the audience to create social connections in new and entertaining ways. Users could adjust their feeds to focus on local, regional, national, or international news, or whatever mix and topics makes sense to them, so all legitimate news organizations of any size get to be part of the platform.
Which news organizations and journalists could be part of such a social media cooperative?
Reporters Without Borders, the international journalism nonprofit, already has a powerful statement for fostering global information spaces for the common good, where “information can only be regarded as reliable when freely gathered, processed and disseminated according to the principles of commitment to truth, plurality of viewpoints and rational methods of establishment and verification of facts.” This would enable a broad range of journalism organizations to participate, and draw a bright line to exclude media propagating disinformation.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle.
From a business perspective, journalism organizations, not third-party social media, would retain analytic data and any advertising revenue. The social media app could be free for any person with a subscription to any member news organization (e.g., a local newspaper, a national magazine of opinion, or digital news site), or with a nominal subscription fee, to provide built-in authentication and help prevent bot accounts. There are also strong global standards for content moderation through the International Fact-Checking Network, which was formed in 2015 and has a nonpartisan code of principles and more than 170 fact-checking groups around the world.
What would such a social media platform cost to create?
Clearly, $44 billion is too much. Bluesky, which has gained favor as an X alternative in recent months, offers a case for comparison. It started internally with just a handful of workers at then-Twitter in 2019. In the past two years, it’s received $23 million in seed funding to get it where it is today.
Bluesky may be the current favorite of many journalists, and has many advantages over other social media platforms, but its worthy purpose to encourage a less toxic space for public conversation does not primarily serve the goals of globally disseminating independent journalism.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle. There has been talk for several years about Europe having its own social media platform to highlight democracy, diversity, solidarity, and privacy, and to avoid “foreign information manipulations and interference” from platforms based in the U.S. that have fallen into Trump’s power orbit and China-based platforms as well.
But, a nongovernmental platform, with a consortium of democracy-minded news organizations, may be most resistant to nationalisms and authoritarianism. The project could be built on an open-source structure like ActivityPub (the infrastructure behind Mastodon) or the AT Protocol (behind Bluesky), which would give more power to users.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse. The alternative is the independent press’s passive acceptance of whatever social media ecosystems Silicon Valley plutocrats or authoritarian governments decide to make, which is bad news for a free press.Keep ReadingShow Less
Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Böll Would Despise What's Been Done to Masha Gessen
Gessen’s real sin was the recognition that the exterminating impulse is not unique to one set of villains and victims.
Dec 21, 2023
Pro-Palestinian speech is routinely punished in the liberal Western world — in the name of democracy, of course. Now, the memories of German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt and German writer Heinrich Böll have been violated in a way that both would despise.
Masha Gessen (pronouns they/them), the Russian-Jewish émigré best known for in-depth reporting on their former country, has been denied the honor of a ceremony after receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize from Germany’s Heinrich Böll Stiftung (foundation).
Why? In the December 9 issue of The New Yorker, Gessen wrote:
… the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
Cue the predictable blowback. Gessen wasn’t factually wrong; instead, the outrage was driven by context. It is culturally verboten in Germany (and the US) to equate any aspect of the Holocaust to the suffering endured by any other people – especially when that suffering is being inflicted by Israel. As others have noted, Arendt faced similar attacks over her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which wasbased on reporting for the same New Yorker magazine.
What’s important is the idea that evil can seem ordinary, and that totalitarianism... can make a monster of almost anyone.
The Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s statement is a masterpiece of deflection and the use of the passive voice. It says that Gessen’s essay “led to heated debates in many places,” and that:
Against this background, the Senate of the City of Bremen has decided to cancel the event and award ceremony that was to take place on December 14th, 2023 and, as a consequence, the event has lost its venue.
The city’s decision is disgraceful but hardly surprising, given the German government’s expressed determination to crack down on pro-Palestinian voices. In fact, several Muslim countries have already brought complaints against Germany before the United Nations human rights forum over that issue.
In an attempt to deny the obvious, the foundation says:
We will try to organise a different type of event with Masha Gessen, an event enabling a nuanced dialogue – including about certain statements made by Gessen that we do not fully endorse – as today such dialogue is more important than ever before.
Why “different”? The foundation could have found another venue. Or it could have held the ceremony in a bus station some other public place, which would have made a dramatic statement against censorship. It would also have been very much in the spirit of its namesake, the writer and pacifist Heinrich Böll.
Böll was president of P.E.N. International, a group dedicated to protecting writers’ freedom of speech, and was fearless in expressing unpopular opinions of his own. Most famously, Böll defended the right to a fair trial of the much-loathed Red Army Faction (the so-called “Baader-Meinhof gang”) rather than trial by tabloid headline and mass media. For that, he weathered a firestorm of criticism that equaled Arendt’s.
Any organization bearing Böll’s name might be expected to defend unpopular speech. But the Stiftung is a political institution, not a moral or literary one. It is a wing of Germany’s Green Party, a formerly left-leaning and pro-environmental group that has become increasingly hawkish, tacking to the right of even the “centrist” Social Democrats on military matters.
But then, what’s in a name? The Greens have even pushed to re-open coal plants.
Like other elite-led ‘liberal’ institutions, the Greens have an organizational imperative to spout the language of inclusion, even when (as in this case) they suppress dissenting voices. This is how they presented their decision notto honor Gessen:
We want to make it very clear that this withdrawal does in no way mean that we are distancing ourselves from Gessen, nor that we want to strip Gessen of the award, or that we no longer value Gessen’s works.
We aren’t distancing ourselves from Masha Geffen, says the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. We just won’t honor them. And, of course, Geffen won’t be allowed to give a speech. But we do hope to permit a ‘nuanced dialogue,’ wherein Gessen will no doubt be forced themselves against a tribunal of hostile interlocutors. That’s ‘dialogue,’ Star Chamber-style.
Does anybody think this would have happened if that recent New Yorker article had not been published? And does anyone think the Greens would have refused Gessen a ceremony and a speech if the article had praised, rather than criticized, Israel?
We aren’t distancing ourselves from Masha Geffen, says the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. We just won’t honor them.
Irony upon irony: A nonbinary Jew who was forced to leave illiberal Russia for its anti-LGBTQ environment is being punished by establishment liberals acting in the name of two free speech advocates. Why? For criticizing a country (Israel) that denies basic freedoms to millions and where same-sex (and interfaith) marriages cannot be performed, by law.
There’s no time to adjudicate all the arguments surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem but, whatever the criticisms, itis clearly the spiritual sibling of Gessen’s essay. The onslaught of accusations against Arendt was front page news at the time, resulting in what Israeli journalist Amos Elon likened to an “excommunication.” For one thing, as Elon writes, Arendt had fallen away from the Zionism of her youth and concluded that,
like other nineteenth-century nationalisms, Zionism had already outlived the conditions from which it emerged and ran the risk of becoming, as Arendt once put it, a “living ghost amid the ruins of our times.’”
A “living ghost” … that was heretical in 1963. It still is today.
Elon writes that Arendt also foresaw “the difficulty of confronting, morally and politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians.” As he puts it, “The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.”
Irony upon irony: A nonbinary Jew who was forced to leave illiberal Russia for its anti-LGBTQ environment is being punished by establishment liberals acting in the name of two free speech advocates.
Rereading Eichmann in Jerusalem, as I did recently, it was more striking than ever to consider the courage it took to write it. Less than two decades after the Holocaust, Arendt was challenging an already-established orthodoxy, one which Elon describes this way:
“... in Israel, the Holocaust was long seen as simply the culmination of a long unbroken line of anti-Semitism, from pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler and Arafat.”
Arendt saw the role that this orthodoxy played in the conduct of the trial, writing of the prosecutor:
Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies. Hence the almost universal hostility in Israel to the mere mention of an international court ...”
This has never been an abstract intellectual debate. The immensity and horror of the Holocaust wields tremendous moral force, as it should. Israel’s leadership had by then developed an ideology based on the centrality of Jewish victimhood and the idea that only Jewish military might could protect Jews from future pogroms. Arendt saw that agenda at work in the Eichmann trial and describes it this way:
The Jews in the Diaspora were to remember how Judaism, “four thousand years old, with its spiritual creations and its ethical strivings, its Messianic aspirations,” had always faced “a hostile world,” how the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep, and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez adventure, and in the almost daily incidents on Israel’s unhappy borders.
This argument was used to justify Israeli military actions. It also imbued Diaspora Jews, especially those living comfortably in the West, with the feeling that they had it too easy. They should be in Israel, fighting its wars and plowing the land. They certainly should never question its decisions.
To reinforce this argument, some Jewish victims of Nazism were judged as weak and compliant, in contrast with Israel’s vigor and strength. Arendt was attacked for criticizing Jewish leaders who cooperated with the Nazis, but the opposite is true: she challenges the prosecution’s implication that some Jews were to blame for their own suffering – which reinforces the idea that Jews must “hit back.”
Arendt saw things differently. To her, Nazism and the Holocaust reflected a crisis of modernity and totalitarianism, rather than a uniquely Jewish-centered phenomenon. It can be both, of course. But to deny that Jewishness and only Jewishness drove the Holocaust was to deny the Israeli state the moral impunity it sought.
To say that anti-Semitism is the sine qua non of Nazism also diminishes the suffering of Nazism’s other victims, including the Roma community, leftists, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people like Gessen. It also preemptively renders the suffering of the Palestinian people invisible. Arendt wasn’t willing to do that.
She also points out that those questions have nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of Adolf Eichmann, who – in the spirit of Heinrich Böll– she insists should receive a fair trial. “On trial are his deeds,” she wrote, “not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.” She criticizes the prosecutor as a media hound and Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion for orchestrating a “show trial,” but shows genuine respect for the judges and their devotion to justice.
Arendt felt that totalitarianism must be understood and punished as totalitarianism, because it’s both a crime against humanity and a global threat. That was her main complaint about the trial. Arendt was not alone in this interpretation. Bruno Bettelheim, the psychologist and concentration camp survivor, was among the public figures who agreed with her. Bettelheim wrote a glowing review of Eichmann in Jerusalem in which he called totalitarianism “the greatest problem of our time” and “the most important issue of our day.”
To Bettelheim the survivor, Eichmann personified a horror that was universal and a threat that was existential. In describing the value of Arendt’s book, Bettelheim wrote, “the best protection against oppressive control and dehumanizing totalitarianism is still a personal understanding of events as they happen.”
Arendt despised Eichmann but, correctly or not, she didn’t see him as specifically anti-Semitic. To her he was a dimwitted bureaucrat, a cog in a totalitarian machine, a personality type that had become common in the modern world. She thought he embodied a more universal and institutionalized depravity. (Gessen describes Vladimir Putin similarly: as dim and self-seeking, more of a pencil pusher than the incarnation of evil.)
The attacks on Arendt followed a blueprint that’s still used today. She was repeatedly described as a “self-hating Jew” — a phrase that has never gone out of currency — as when an author described both her and Bettelheim as suffering from “an essentially Jewish phenomenon...self-hatred.”
The attacks were well-organized, as Amon Elon writes:
A nationwide campaign was launched in the United States to discredit her in the academic world. There was a startling disproportion between the ferocity of the reaction and its immediate cause. A group of lecturers—some flown in from Israel and England-toured the country decrying Arendt as a “self-hating Jew,” the “Rosa Luxemburg of Nothingness.”
Four separate Jewish organizations hired scholars to go through her text, line by line, in order to discredit it and to find mistakes though most of them turned out to be minor: incorrect dates and misspelled names. A review of the book in the Intermountain Jewish News was headlined “Self-hating Jewess writes pro-Eichmann book.”
Arendt emphasized the universal nature, and universal threat, of totalitarianism. Her book’s controversial subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” makes that clear. If evil can be ordinary—if it can be done by people who don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, by people who follow the rules—that might implicate anyone.
There have been endless debates about Arendt’s use of the word “banality,” but what matters most is not whether it’s the best label for Eichmann. What’s important is the idea that evil can seem ordinary, and that totalitarianism—whether it’s the old-fashioned, jackbooted kind, or the seemingly democratic misdirection of Prof. Sheldon Wolin’s “inverted totalitarianism”—can make a monster of almost anyone.
Journalists who censor themselves. Politicians who curry favor for campaign cash. Executives at Lockheed or Boeing. US government officials who ship antipersonnel weapons bound for Gaza. The leaders of Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Citizens who won’t question their own preconceptions. You. Me.
Bettelheim, like Arendt, was not afraid to implicate his adopted country. In his review of her book he wrote,
... it is also totalitarianism when a nation plans for atomic destruction on a grand scale, even if that nation is democratic and plans only for defense. This is because such plans fail to set limits within the human scope. To entertain the possibility of risking atomic destruction for millions is to toy with totalitarianism because it implies the right of a state to pursue its goals no matter what.
Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine provides a vivid glimpse of the architects of global destruction at home in their bureaucratic habitat.
In the end, the word “banality” suggests that the Nazis were not as different from the rest of us as we’d like to believe. Masha Gessen’s real sin, like Arendt’s, was the recognition that the exterminating impulse is not unique to one set of villains and victims. It can arise and be executed anywhere, by anyone, at any time — in this country and its allies, among people who look and act like us, on a day like today. Even here, even now, even as these words are being written.
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