Editing Redistribution of Empathy (section)

== Description ==

Weinstein defines redistribution of empathy as a cultural trend where empathy is misused to favor those committing harm or claiming victimhood ideologically, at the expense of genuine victims. This creates a competitive dynamic for moral superiority, overshadowing actual suffering and eroding rational discourse. He contrasts this with authentic empathy, which should be comprehensive and not weaponized for social or ideological purposes.

In podcast discussions, Weinstein describes it as a false "expansion of empathy," where empathy is withdrawn from traditional recipients and reassigned, contributing to societal divisions. He ties it to "revolutionary thinking" perceived as pro-empathy but actually selective, confined excesses to campuses, and misconceptions about progressive goals.

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''There's a point about sanctimony and appearing to do good while doing evil. That is different from the need to parent and protect. Part of what's going on is a '''redistribution of empathy''', which is being called an expansion of empathy, right? So the idea is we are going to be extra specially sympathetic with some groups and empathic with their trauma, their pain. And we are going to take away compassion from other groups. So, for example, if you look at suicide statistics in the United States, from all of the rhetoric, you would think that young Black, Asian females would be at the top of the suicide statistics. But it's really middle aged white men who are killing themselves in incredible numbers. And you bring up the statistic, and there's an exchange rate in terms of human misery that is measured in suicide. It's a pretty unfudgable thing when you kill yourself, you're probably in an extremely negative state of personal trauma. So what does the compassion group think about the fact that the group most likely to end their own lives is exactly the group that is faulted, you know, for the patriarchy? It's astounding. "Oh, poor little white men in the Midwest had their privilege taken away." What the hell are you talking about? You're talking about people killing themselves. You're talking about fathers and grandfathers dying. What we're talking about is a redistribution of compassion. We're talking about taking compassion away from people of European descent. We're talking about taking compassion away from men. We're talking about taking compassion away from a business person like Steve Jobs, who might have pancreatic cancer and be dying from it in his 50s because he had the privilege of building billion dollar companies. 

''Who the hell are you? What is your problem? Come out of the shadows and admit to what you want. You want a redistribution of compassion. You're calling this empathy. It is anything but empathy. Empathy would be an expansion of our understanding of each other's problems and woes. This is basically saying that these people are worthy of compassion, and these people aren't. The child who might have been wronged for not having a clear gender identity—and that would have happened under any era in any circumstance—that's one life, and then you have a bunch of lives over here that are children who are pushed toward sexual reassignment surgery and are sexually mutilated for no reason at all because of developmental, you know, reasons that they got bad advice from adults while they were trying to assemble themselves. And you're compassionate about this and you're not compassionate about that? I don't want you anywhere near a school. If you're not willing to deal with type one and type two error, you don't belong around our children. If you don't understand that human development is important and that it is very hard to improve on the gender binary that is, even if there are edge cases, the gender binary is there for a reason and you don't have a clue how complicated the gender binary is. You probably haven't even studied sexuality in different species that assign gender. You know, flatworms assign it based on a contest. The winner is male and the loser is female. You don't like that? Tough luck. You know, bedbugs only practice traumatic insemination. You don't like that? I'm sorry. How are you going to engineer the entire world around your crazy theories of gender and sexuality? We need these people away from children. They're working out their own stuff. We need to recognize that homosexuality, particularly among men in an obligate fashion, is a normal, conserved part of the human experience. Basically there is a gender binary, there is a small number of edge cases at a hardware level, there's a small number of cases meant at a software level. 

''We have to be compassionate about all that, but we can't take compassion away from everyone else. And that's a message to both the Left and the Right. Stop saying there are only two sexes. It's offensive. And stop forcing people to say something so simplistic because you're threatening their children.

- '''Eric Weinstein''' on [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_swB_KS8Hw&t=9163s Modern Wisdom]
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