Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Empathy isn't killing us, enabling us.
[00:00:08] Elon Musk says empathy is pushing society towards suicide. He says it on X. He said it recently on Bill Maher and Joe Rogan. The problem is not empathy. The problem is what now passes for empathy, rescuing people from the consequences of their own choices, calling it compassion and then wondering why the rich kid never grows up, the addict never recovers, or the repeat offender never changes.
[00:00:35] We don't have an empathy problem. We have an enabling problem.
[00:00:39] We've all seen how people who have hurt others walk away clean while everyone else pays full price.
[00:00:46] The truth is, consequences are disappearing for more than just the rich. So some would call this a leveling out.
[00:00:53] My take two wrongs don't make a right.
[00:00:57] People are furious on both sides of the political spectrum. The left sees executives, donors and politicians escaping consequences.
[00:01:05] The right sees violence on the streets, recidivism without consequence, and a justice system that prioritizes offenders, comfort over public accountability.
[00:01:16] They are arguing about the same moral breakdown, a culture that no longer knows how to pair compassion with accountability.
[00:01:23] Empathy is not the problem, it's how we handle it. We are seeing on a macro scale what is happening in families.
[00:01:31] People often misread Robert Sapolsky, the great defender of determinism. His argument is not simply that criminals had bad childhoods and should therefore be released. His argument is that human behavior emerges from biology, conditioning, circumstance and luck.
[00:01:49] But here is the part many people miss. Even Sapolsky support separating dangerous people from society when safety requires it. There is a difference between punishment as a moral revenge and containment as protection. In a recent New York magazine article, writer Lane Brown spent two months interviewing the ultra rich about what extreme wealth does to the brain. Mark Cuban put it plainly, wealth isn't transformative, it an amplifier. I agree.
[00:02:17] It's like getting married or having a baby to save a relationship.
[00:02:23] Adding money to an already problematic life will not solve problems. Money turns up the volume on whoever you already are. If you're a jerk, adding money will only turn you into a bigger jerk.
[00:02:37] Why? The consequences necessary to refine your character and take it away.
[00:02:42] Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judd Brewer at Brown University just wrote an article on substack that talks about how good and bad actions actually feel physically.
[00:02:52] It's complicated because a lot of how we feel is dictated by our society or polis, as he puts it. In his piece, he writes about people who mistake accommodation, smoothing, agreeing or giving in for kindness when it is actually a habit. The trigger is discomfort. The behavior is accommodation, smoothing, degree and Giving in the reward is brief relief, resembling other unhealthy habit loops. We think it's kindness, but it's not. Breuer draws on Aristotle and how he understood that pleasure and pain were guides and how we are shaped by the culture around us.
[00:03:29] The polis trains us, the family reinforces it.
[00:03:33] Breuer's critique of Aristotle is this.
[00:03:37] The framework only works if the surrounding culture is pointed in the right direction.
[00:03:42] Aristotle had no problem with slavery. At that time, it was normal. Everyone had slaves. When you look back to the biblical times, the polis believed sacrificing sons to the gods was the thing to do.
[00:03:55] There are social norms we find acceptable today that future generations may not.
[00:04:01] Our polis has learned to enable. It, rewards, rescue. It calls insulation love. It has created a habit loop. What wealthy families call empathy feels like love. However, Brewer's lab found that genuine kindness feels open and expansive. Kindness driven by discomfort with conflict or fear of disapproval, or a trained sense that our job is to manage other people's pain that feels contracted. You feel tightness in the chest and you enable to feel better. So we think that's kindness, but in fact we're in a habit loop. A child's distress. We feel discomfort. We enable or rescue. The reward is relief.
[00:04:42] I know a young man who graduated high school by the skin of his teeth. Every college he applied to rejected him. Then one called back. His family had donated to the school.
[00:04:54] The school offered him a audit. Classes, prove yourself, earn retroactive credit. He said no. He told his family it made him feel gross. He didn't want to walk onto a campus knowing the door only opened because of a check.
[00:05:09] He went to work instead, paid his own way. He's in community college now and thriving.
[00:05:16] Handouts don't improve self esteem. He knew that before anyone taught it to him. His body knew it.
[00:05:22] And by trying to help him, his parents were making the problem bigger. They made him feel he couldn't handle hard things.
[00:05:30] Inadvertently, they were making him soft. They were teaching him the opposite of being resourceful, rugged and resilient. That young man nearly lost his God given right to fail and find out what he was made of. That young man averted what the wealthy traditionally do. Avoid consequences.
[00:05:47] But they don't call it enabling. They call it protecting their kids. They hire lawyers. They extract them from dire situations with no ramifications. They smooth the path. They make sure their children don't have to struggle like they did or like they never did. Guilt drives the behavior. And now the same pattern has spread far beyond Wealth. We have expanded the logic of privilege to groups we see as wounded, disadvantaged, traumatized or unable to cope.
[00:06:13] Instead of offering real support, we lower the standard, remove the friction, and call it compassion. Everyone feels virtuous. No one gets stronger.
[00:06:22] Privilege is what happens when any group, for any reason, gets insulated from the consequences of their choices. Privilege is now for everyone. I know of a wilderness program designed around ruggedness, resilience, resourcefulness and refinement. Its purpose was to give children the dignity of doing hard things in nature.
[00:06:40] But over time, the adults softened the experience. Junk food instead of real food, WI fi instead of unplugged beds instead of cots, easy chores instead of demanding work.
[00:06:52] The argument was compassionate. These children would never otherwise get access to nature. But access without transformation is not the same thing as opportunity. They were brought to the wilderness, but the adults were so afraid they would leave that they allowed the kids to bring the city to the country unchecked. Empathy that removes consequences does cause harm. When you shield someone from the results of their choices, they don't learn, they don't grow, they stay stuck. And often they get worse.
[00:07:21] I know this not from research from 20 years in recovery, watching people I love get rescued one more time and one more time after that, until there was nothing left to rescue.
[00:07:34] When we need the stewardship compassionate approach, real empathy with boundaries. Real empathy doesn't remove consequences. It believes you can survive them.
[00:07:43] The enabler says, I can't watch you struggle, so I'll fix it.
[00:07:48] Brewer would ask us to recognize that contracted feeling in the chest.
[00:07:54] The steward says, this is hard. I'll stay right here while you go through it.
[00:08:00] That's the expansive feeling his lab measured.
[00:08:04] Dr. Brewer quoted Abraham Lincoln, who, when asked about his faith, reportedly said, when he did good, he felt good.
[00:08:12] When he did bad, he felt bad. That was his religion. Brewer's lab suggests Lincoln was onto something.
[00:08:20] The body keeps its own ledger, and it knows the difference between genuine care and avoidance with wearing care's face.
[00:08:29] If the habit was enabling before the money arrived or before the protection arrived, wealth doesn't correct it. Neither does any form of insulation. It perfects it. Wealth doesn't create different problems. It makes the same ones bigger and easier to hide.
[00:08:46] The enabling crisis isn't rising from the bottom. It's trickling down from generations of people who had enough resources to avoid correction and pass that habit on like an heirloom across every group.
[00:08:58] You can't lead a family, a company, a community, or a country by removing all friction.
[00:09:06] You can only lead by staying in the room when things get hard.
[00:09:10] That's tough love.
[00:09:15] If this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming.
[00:09:24] But here's the real thing. I want you to know if you're carrying something you can't talk about, if you have every resource except someone who actually understands what wealth costs. I work one on one with people like you navigating exactly that. You can reach me at Diana O E H R L I dot com. Thanks for listening.
