Why don't we care more about whether people in positions of power have empathy?
(rachelgilmore.substack.com)
Because empathy doesn’t scale.
Empathy works great when you live in a small village and everyone knows each other. It breaks down completely when you get to a city where almost everyone you see is always a stranger.
You can take the most caring person you know who is always happy to help out or offer a shoulder to cry on. Put them onto a crowded subway with the unkempt, the unruly, people with untreated mental illnesses talking out loud or yelling, and they’ll feel threatened and keep their head down.
Generally it doesn’t even have to be anywhere near that extreme. Most people don’t want random people talking to them, even without any aggression involved. Now there are some rare people who feel comfortable engaging those situations but most people absolutely do not. The other side of the coin is that (when watching disasters on the news or whatever) people don’t feel empathy for statistics at all, they need to see a face to empathize with.
Lastly, I will say that empathy does guide public decision making more than it should in a lot of cases. People will engage in stranger danger moral panics or support the “war on terrorism” much more readily than they’ll support attempts to curtail car accident deaths, despite the latter killing far more than the former two combined.