The vibrant world of private empathy has been replaced by faceless state lodges, pity, mercy, the elation of giving, they are all tax deductible.
In generally speaking, it is a sorry sight.
It's the demise of empathy. We have been warning against this for like ages. And no one would listen. And no one would listen because the efforts of money, efforts of power, efforts of manipulating other people to obtain desirable goals and preferable outcomes, it's taken over.
Even public intellectuals who tell you how to live your life, how to become better people, they're not telling you how to become better people. They're teaching you how to become more efficient people, very often at the expense of others.
I'm sorry, I can't think of a single public intellectual who is not narcissistic, psychopathic, self-centered, egotistical, labile, dysregulated, sadistic to some extent. And all of them are teaching you, all of them are teaching you, not how to develop empathy, compassion and care and love towards your fellow beings, but how to make maximal use of your natural endowments and to fake and to lie and to pretend so as to obtain whatever and to extricate whatever you can for others.
In other words, the view of public intellectuals today is that the world is a win-lose situation. In this sense, I'm terribly sorry to say that I can't see any difference in principle between Donald Trump's jungle, Darwinian view of the world and any public intellectual I know.
They all say the same.
But some of them are saying it in a highfalutin way. Some of them, you know, in a pub with a pint kind of way. But they are all saying the same. It's eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, manipulate or be manipulated. Don't be the sucker. Get ahead. Make the most and the help with others.