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.

Because our culture has spent the past 250 years attempting to minimize the value of empathy.

That’s something that always drives me crazy about the “value of the atomic family” schtick in some conservative circles. On the one hand, they want a return to the atomic family. On the other, they’re still full steam ahead on individualism and keeping empathy out of decision processes.

Meanwhile, other family-based cultures are messy, more “molecular family” than the “traditional” atomic family, because the culture is based on empathy and shame/honor. Without empathy, leadership always dehumanizes the ones it is supposed to serve.

It is really false. In fact, most people care if leaders have empathy, they care that the people in power have no empathy, this is the most wanted trait for ceo and top level executives. Psychopaths and sociopaths make the best leaders. Or this is what our society try to push.

I care about it a great deal.

But if you want a hypothesis for your question…

I think its because, as primates, we feel a desire to punish our enemies. It an emotional impulse, and therefore gets a power buff in its influence over our beliefs compared to being reasonable and fostering understanding. The empathetic leader is perceived to lack in their capabilities for delivering punishment.

Control is why we (the society) are discouraged from developing the skills to be reasonable in the first place.

It really should be at or near the top of the list of requirements IMO

Because not giving a damn bubbled up from it’s sources as teenage angst and toxic masculinity… into the actually dominant role model for rich men

I remember in school everyone was indoctrinated about how amazing globalism is. The issue is that before that those sociopathic narcissist fucks could only cause so much damage. Now that have the whole globe as their playground and their methods grow better and better while the old tricks to deal with them (ergo taking them out to the fields to see the flowers) don’t work anymore because they filled the forces with their own kind.

I suppose because it’s so common. Power creates apathy, it’s a human trait and universal.

The way to mitigate it is to limit their time in power. There are gentle and not-so-gentle ways to achieve that. However it’s done, it needs to be institutionalized and protected as a process. Because people in power will spend some of their power trying to tear down any such process, due to, you know, a lack of empathy. It seems to be a circular trap we’re all stuck in, but maybe someday we’ll figure out a permanent solution. Maybe.

I would buy a mic clip I think.