Mat Messerschmidt
Nietzsche, Musk, and Clinton on Empathy
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Elon Musk said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2025, a claim echoed by others associated with the masculinist right. In response, Hillary Clinton recently characterized MAGA as a “war on empathy.”
Something like Musk’s claim – not just that empathy might have a downside, but that it could be a fatal flaw of Western civilization – was made by Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1887 Genealogy of Morals. The Genealogy tells the story of pagan nobles in the ancient Western world getting tricked into adopting the worldview of the peoples whom they had enslaved or subdued. The ancient pagans professed a fundamentally inegalitarian moral code that prized excellence, strength, beauty, and achievement. This “noble” morality is undermined by slaves who serve their own self-interest by tricking the nobles into adopting an egalitarian moral code based on compassion (Mitleid) and selflessness. This new morality, “slave morality,” forms the ethical core of Christianity and then of democracy and socialism, for Nietzsche, and eventually gives us modern decadent society, in which the social hierarchy required for cultural vitality has been lost. A careful scholarly engagement with the Genealogy would have to be careful about equating Musk’s “empathy” with Nietzsche’s “compassion,” but we can certainly imagine Nietzsche being highly amenable to Musk’s claim that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Was Nietzsche right about the virulence of compassion? It is easy to be irritated by evasions of this question in scholarly responses to the Genealogy: oftentimes, professional readers of Nietzsche either hide behind the notion of scholarly impartiality, reporting Nietzsche’s position without taking any stance on it, or they pull out of the Nietzsche text a notion of “compassion” that is either so narrowly defined or so obviously tainted that it does not feel as if there is any real price to the rejection of compassion.
In opposition to compassion, Nietzsche names a potentially vital sort of fellow feeling that is alien to the present as he sees it, a kind of fellow feeling that actually wishes hardship upon the ones one loves. Why would one wish suffering upon loved ones? Because hardship is the way to the greatest growth and the highest achievements. He associates this form of solidarity with noble morality and against the compassion of the egalitarian slave: “To those human beings which matter to me at all, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, abuse, debasement … I have no compassion [Mitleid] for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one has any worth: that one endures.” Such a wish follows the logic of his famous claim that “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” If one wants strong friends, one ought to wish them suffering and desolation! As absurd as this might sound to 21st-century ears, it offers a corrective balance to the way friends tend to speak to each other about their travails today, which often seems to reflect the sympathetic gentility and endless patience of the psychologist’s office. A real friend, Nietzsche says, points us toward difficult trials, because a real friend believes we are worthy of difficult trials. Real friends do not indulge our weakness but help us grow stronger.
Then again, could any human community, in even the barest sense of that word, exist without a basic impulse to care for the weak? Would the complete eradication of this sort of impulse, such as empathy, be the victory of nature over sick culture, as Nietzsche implies? Wouldn’t it rather be the perverse extinction of an inclination we see all over the natural, pre-cultural animal world? Here it is worth remembering that Nietzsche himself lived almost entirely outside community. He was a higher human being, but he also lived what could be viewed as a broken life, precisely because it was bereft of the ties which bind communities together. Nietzsche’s own mode of existence could serve as a cautionary tale regarding what happens when the foundations of community, which include empathy, are neglected or rejected – and we might postulate that his own views on community and its prerequisites are warped by the fact that he lacked it.
But how much empathy do we need? How central to our ethical outlook should the ability to relate and respond to the pain of others be? This question matters both for the political world inhabited by Musk and Clinton in the 2020s and more generally for the modern world whose genesis is narrated by Nietzsche’s Genealogy. The possibility of excessive empathy is raised by the issue of campus speech. What happens when the very pursuit of truth at universities must regulate and delimit itself according to the notion that speech is violence – the notion that we must cease and desist the moment our words cause emotional pain in listeners? The question of the limits of empathy becomes a very real one when, faced with this dilemma, some people are unambiguously choosing empathy over inquiry. Here, empathy taken too far really does carry a considerable cost and becomes socially deleterious. Panning out from the current political moment to modernity as viewed by Nietzsche, we are offered a picture of a world of sterility, an anaesthetized world that has become so safe, so sheltered from hardship, that it has lost any tolerance for pain. But pain, Nietzsche believes, is necessary for great things: one must leave one’s comfort zone to reach new heights. This is why it is possible for him to believe in the possibility of what we might call a dystopia of empathy. Empathy keeps us from hardship, and a lack of hardship keeps us from greatness. “Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples,” he tells us in The Gay Science, “and ask yourself whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is impossible.”
In her article on “MAGA’s war on empathy,” Clinton at one point responds to a right-wing podcaster speaking of “toxic empathy.” “Toxic empathy!” she retorts, “What an oxymoron.” She accuses the speaker of faux-Christian righteousness before declaring from on high that the very phrase is “appalling” and indicative of “moral bankruptcy,” and “certainly not what I was taught in Sunday school.” But – at the risk of being appalling to Hillary Clinton – of course there can be toxic empathy. We have seen it in our lifetimes. The key would be to recognize this without throwing the baby out with the bathwater – in other words, to diagnose the potential excesses of empathy without undermining a basic element of human togetherness by calling empathy generally toxic, as Nietzsche does. But this would require us to develop the thoroughly un-Nietzschean virtue of moderation.
How to cite this article
Mat Messerschmidt ,,Nietzsche, Musk, and Clinton on Empathy’’ in Anthropos. Revista de filosofie, arte și umanioare nr. 5 / 2026
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