![“In my work with the defendants [at the Nuremberg Trials, 1945-1949] I was searching for the nature of evil, and I now think I have come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” —psychologist Gustave Gilbert](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/32201175-847a-4cab-8cf0-e05945842616.jpeg)
Empathy is dependent-on mirror-neuron-system: without that working, you're a psychopath, from what I can see.
The more mirror-neuron-function, the greater the pressure to be in empathy.
Claiming that it's a learned-skill to me seems backwards:
sociopathy's a learned-skill, culturally.
Empathy's the natural-default.
Show me a chimp-mom not having empathy for her baby/toddler..
It's non-empathy which has to be enforced, at the whole-population scale, to change/imprint/configure that population.
The people who after being in the Soviet Union said things like "we weren't sociopathic, before", back this.
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