With all due respect to Elon Musk’s vaulted opinion, given credence by the number of dollars that he maintains in his bank account, the world suffers not from an excess but from a scarcity of empathy.
It is a lack of love for one’s fellow human being that leads to war. A lack of love leads to all the ills that society struggles to address. Not being able to see another person as having innate dignity is what makes people call each other names that are unkind, cruel, and demeaning. We only love God to the extent we love our neighbor, and if the news is any indication, we have a lot of neighbors, we do not love.
The absence of empathy allows for exploitation, of laborers, of societies, of the poor. It lets people polute the oceans and the land and the air, because the costs are thrown onto those we do not see, and thus do not care if we injure, the future generations of people, and the present populations that cannot escape where the trash winds up.
Not caring leads to letting people be forgotten, ignored, passed over, passed on, unheralded, unheard, unnoticed. We live in a world seeking to become self sustaining islands unbothered by anyone else’s preferences or needs. I’d say the lack of empathy is visible from space, but given that Elon regularly sends satalites and rockets up there, perhaps he doesn’t quite know what empathy is, or he’d have seen the lack of it from the Heavens.
The heavens hear the cry of the poor, and know the deeper reality, is that the world will be saved by empathy.
The fate of us all is dependent upon God’s willingness to love us despite our ongoing consistent unworthiness.
But being a person who is empathetic, my first thought at Elon’s words are, “Why does he think this way?” And it made me consider, that those who have all this world has to offer –power, fame, money and access to excess beyond what we can imagine, do not comprehend empathy because they do not think they need it, nor do they trust feelings others hold with respect to them to be anything other than bought for loyalty.
Empathy seems like an indulgence of sentiment where the recipient is gaining undue influence and power, and the giver receives nothing but the glow of virtue signalling. They do not believe it to be genuine, either in the giving or receiving. They do not understand how the water becomes wine, or the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. They do not comprehend the multiplying of the loaves to feed the five thousand, they do not understand the great gift of Christ on the Cross.
The gifting of the self, out of love for others, is what turns a marriage into a sacrament. It is what makes the enduring of suffering, a source of redemptive grace. What Elon and President Trump need, is to understand the one thing all their money and power and influence and prospective power cannot buy. They may be adored by some, fanatically followed by others.
However, until they can have empathy for someone who cannot pay them back, who cannot profit them, who brings no influence or bonus by being, they will persist in believing that the world has too much empathy for the poor, and that is why the poor persist in being. The Christ Child comes in the stable, with nothing, and loving Him changes everything. Let us pray that those with power and means, are visited not by three spirits but by the Trinity, and given a sense of what would truly make this world better –profound empathy for all.
When the whole world’s people cannot bear to allow for suffering, such that they are all trying to outdo each other in service and generosity to those in need, the empathy will be visible to Heaven, and visible from the much lower vantage point of space, even to the human eye. When the human ego we all suffer from, gets out of the way, and each of us sees each person as a person, the universe will gasp at the beauty of this small blue planet.
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