Fourteen thousand years ago, Siberian and Mongolian people crossed the Bering land bridge into North America. Following the ice-free coastline, they eventually found the Andes mountains, the longest linear stretch of mountains in the world. There, unaffected by Rome or Greece, or Moses, or Plato, or Aristotle, or by any of the rest of world history, they . . . naturally . . . became the Inca civilization, the largest, most sophisticated civilization of the New World. One hundred thousand elites controlled 10 million peasants, unified by a religion of sun worship, ruled by an emperor who was “the king, the pope, and Jesus Christ all rolled into one.” All land was state owned, peasants were granted rights to till communal lands. Taxes were paid with labor, which created surpluses of food, tools, and weapons, which were stored along the Inca road network, and which were used for times of want, for war, and for patronage. The few ruled the many. Natural civilization.
In 1528, Francisco Pizarro found a Bronze Age society, 2,500 years back in time. The Incas did not have writing, or money, but they had deadly slingshots, and clubs, and vast armies. The Spaniards, though, had steel swords, armor, and horses, and like tank warfare against foot soldiers, 168 Spanish horsemen conquered 10 million Incan foot soldiers.
History has been the story of men killing other men, and so also in the New World. The Incas had been fighting a gruesome civil war for many years, ever since their great Inca chief was killed by another old world weapon – small pox. His sons fought to the death for the throne. Atahualpa had just conquered brother Huascar and executed his entire family, and was on his victory trip to Cuzco, to be crowned Sun King, when strange boats appeared off the coast. At Cajamarca, Atahualpa crossed Pizarro’s path. He promptly executed any of his men that showed any fear of the strange horse beasts.
The Incas, it seems, did not know the plight of Montezuma and the Aztecs. They were self-sufficient mountain people, not traders with the larger world. Pizarro had been with Cortes. He enticed Atahualpa into a courtyard, and in a bloody ambush, captured him.
For ransom, Atahualpa filled the Cajamarca courtyard with gold. Pizarro executed him anyway. His wife became Pizarro’s mistress, and bore him two sons.
To subdue a civilization, dethrone its religion.
The last Inca Emperor, Tupac Amaru, in Cuzco before his execution, tells his people that their religion has been false.
“Lords, . . . Let it be known that I am a Christian, and they have baptized me and I wish to die under the law of God – and I have to die. And that everything that my ancestors, the Incas, and I have told you up until now – that you should worship the sun god, Punchao, the shrines, idols, stones, rivers, mountains, and sacred things – is a lie and completely false. When we used to tell you that we were entering [a temple] to speak to the sun, when we told you what it said and that it spoke – this was a lie.”
Across the way from his childhood row-house home, across Strawberry Fields, Paul McCartney met one John Lennon. Both of their mothers died while they were teenagers, both of their fathers were musicians. Lennon-McCartney wrote and performed songs, and the whole world went . . .crazy . . .over their music, and still does.
Paul is charming, kind, a devoted father, a faithful husband, a very successful businessman, and a Brit who honors his queen. He has always loved his Liverpool past.
“Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies”
He has lived 50 years of magic – wealth, fame, exhilarating creativity, and bittersweet pain and loss.
He still can’t read music.
What ever is the gift for songwriting and singing, Paul has it. He gives commanding concert performances, like a gifted athlete. He sings his solo career songs, yes, but with Beatle songs – which he is careful to do as they were originally done, . . . he brings down the house. . . . still. It is the Beatles music that carries gloriously on, ever ecstatically received.
Paul McCartney is reticent with personal feelings, and superficial in person. He barely seems to know Paul McCartney. “Maybe I’m amazed” . . . . maybe? He just never wants to get deep.
“the fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round.”
“Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say”. ‘Was I harking back to my mum? he asks. Who would know? Few realize that his song ‘Blackbird’ was written to console african-americans after the death of Martin Luther King.
“Take these broken wings and learn to fly“.
He can’t explain his creativity – or doesn’t want to. “I’m very lucky with my voice, I have no idea how it happens“. Songs just come to him. He dreamed the melody for his greatest song, ‘Yesterday’, the most recorded song in history. He spent months sure that he had heard it somewhere before, trying to find out where.
Paul has this mastery of melody, how it forms and carries a song. His best songs feel already known, like they could be no other way. The words, by themselves, have almost nothing there.
“there is an unmistakeable sadness in McCartney’s gaze and muted manner“. John Colapinto, The New Yorker, June 2007
He was unable to reconcile with the bruising John Lennon, before his death. And there is the losses of his mother and wife, both in the full of their lives, to the same disease.
“For well you know that its a fool who plays it cool, by making the world a little colder” – Ironically, it was John Lennon who wanted this line kept in the song.
Above all the acrimony and nihilism of his times, he holds out, decent, and up beat. The spirit of a 19 year old Beatle lives on.
“I’m never going to believe I’m 70. I don’t care what you say. There’s a little cell in my brain that’s never going to believe that“, Rolling Stone, March 2012
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2012-03-18 19:46:532012-03-18 19:46:53Sir Paul
In the movie Drive, the central character has a special talent. Driving, yes, but more compelling, he can stay calm and focused during intense moments, like driving fast and escaping the police, or like when someone is trying to kill him. It is a gift, his ability to stay cool, it helps him get by. But it may have helped him get involved with the wrong people.
Behind the wheel, his eyes centered on the road, he is ever wary, a taut spring. His smile is soft, his eyes rarely blink. He says pretty much only what is necessary to say. He seems satisfied staying in the background. Somehow he has ended up half way between good people and bad.
He meets a girl from down the hall, an innocent, vulnerable mother to a young son. He helps her out. Watching television, the boy says you can always tell who the bad guys are. Driver asks: ‘How do you know?’
The girl’s husband has been away, in prison, for what we don’t know. He eventually comes home, and has problems he can’t handle. He is roughed up to pay escalating demands for protection payments he may or may not have ‘purchased’ while in prison. This threatens the mother and boy. Driver decides to help get the money, in a robbery he has been asked to drive for, but things go awry.
Bad guys show up for the same money. They kill the husband. In a sinister luxury SUV, they give chase. Driver races away. He manages to get bumper to bumper – in front of them – going very fast, backward, in control. They think they have him, but just near the end of the road, an end they don’t see because they are looking at him, he spins around to the side, and they go on to crash.
But he gets found, and almost killed. He acts fast, and survives.
Somehow, he knows how to deal with creeps, how you have to speak to them, how you cannot trust them, how they only respond to threat and force, how you sometimes have to kill them.
But they keep coming, like insects. He has to stomp one to death, in front of her, in an elevator, to protect her. He has no choice. She watches. Maybe she thinks he is one of them. She leaves. What can he say?
They kill his friend.
He must have thought he was one of them, at one time, but with her he seems to realize he isn’t. He is not going to go back.
He phones her: “I just want you to know that you and the boy are the best thing that has ever happened to me”.
Then he goes to settle things, to ensure her safety. He gives the ring leader a chance to honor an honest deal. The guy doesn’t, of course, and Driver, nearly killed, has to do what he has to do.
“Quantum theory predicts that the vacuum of space is a roiling bath of virtual particles that continuously appear and disappear. These vacuum fluctuations produce measurable phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, which arises from the pressure the virtual photons exert on stationary bodies. In 1970, Gerald Moore theorized that bodies in accelerated motion would produce real photons out of quantum vacuum fluctuation . . . Accelerated bodies modify quantum vacuum fluctuations, causing emission of photon pairs from the vacuum and dissipation of the bodies’ motional energy. The power dissipated in the motion of the body is equal to the total radiated electromagnetic power, as expected according to the law of energy conservation.” Nature, November, 17, 2011.
Acceleration of matter in vacuum space creates photons, particles of light. Acceleration of spin creates magnetism. Acceleration of mass creates gravity. There. . is. . something. . about. . acceleration. It is a form of change, of variation, in our universe, a special form, it is change of change – change squared. And it is the essence of gravity, matter, and light.
It is mysterious that light has the same velocity for all observers, but it does. To be so, it must be something like infinite acceleration, each point of light being infinitely close to being instanteously brief, but infinitely accelerated from the previous point, infinitely close to reaching an asymptotic limit of velocity that is, weirdly, infinitely close to being constant and therefore . . .finite. Einstein realized that light, then, being infinite acceleration that paradoxically achieves finite and constant velocity, is the universal invariant. It can be relative or variable to no other position or movement. Curiously, although matter and energy are interchangeable, only energy – electromagnetic radiation – can travel at the speed of light, matter cannot.
The Roman poet, Lucretius, in his famous poem: On the Nature of Things, introduced to the Roman world, the philosophy of the pre-Socratic Greeks of 300 B. C. These thinkers had deduced that the building blocks of reality – atoms – were infinitely small, infinite-in-number entities that repell and attract each other such as to create all things and events. These ancient Greeks saw, long before Darwin and Einstein and quantum physics, that the fundamental units must have . . . what Lucretius called: swerve – an irreducible, varying indeterminancy in their behavior so as to make for the change with variation that is necessary for the evolutionary processes that manifest all things and events, inorganic and organic. The most basic units of reality, they realized must be, themselves, units of variation, units of change.
“If all the individual particles, in their infinite numbers, fell through the void in straight lines, pulled down by their own weight like raindrops, nothing would ever exist. But the particles do not move lockstep in a preordained single direction. Instead, “at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree thqt could be described as no more than a shift of movement” (2.218-20 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things), Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt, pg.188.
“Even if cooled to a temperature of absolute zero, all objects will retain a fundamental jitter in their physical positions due to quantum ‘zero-point’ fluctuations.” Painter, et. al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 033602, 2012
Gestapo Chief Rudolph Diels: “The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it.” In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson, 2011.
For Boethius, the 400 AD Roman philosopher, evil is US – we all have capacity for evil, and therefore to combat evil we must look to ourselves and cultivate our goodness. Evil is the absence of good. “We must break the ‘cycle of violence‘. This is the modern view, the enlightenment view, the christian view.
That evil is OTHER, that there is a distinct dualism of good and evil, this is the premodern view, the Manichaean view, the view of Mani, the early 250 A.D. Persian mystic whose ideas rivaled and threatened Roman paganism, and then christianity. Evil is a force to be opposed, to be conquered.
In Science of Evil, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen finds that evil is a disorder of empathy. We all vary in our ’empathy quotient’. There are those with the ‘continuous, unstoppable drive to empathize‘, and those with lesser empathy. There are components of empathy – recognition and response, feeling and understanding, action and inaction. Failure to act is as significant as not feeling. There is transient empathy erosion, from fatigue, or drugs and alcohol, or depression. There is Groupthink evil, empathy that is over-powered by enthusiasm and solidarity. Nazi gatherings were organized pageants of celebration.
Lack of empathy can be a failure to be good, but it also can be something else. There are those with no empathy. . . at all, zero empathy. For them, lack of empathy is . . . .enjoyment. Serial killers relish their deceit and the knowing terror in their victim’s eyes. Stalin’s greatest joy was to go to sleep knowing that his plans for revenge were unfolding. Nazi evil was beyond efficiency. The Nazi’s precisely engineered emotional as well as physical suffering, over and above the murdering. They practiced this with a sickening aesthetic, an almost artistic intensity.
Empathy by definition is seeing one’s self in others. Those with strong empathy just aren’t likely to perceive, aren’t likely to “empathize” – with the lack of empathy others may have. This asymmetry of awareness empowers those with no empathy to use charm, and to thrive, and the rest is human history.
In Explaining Hitler, 1998, Ron Rosenbaum, in his survey of theories of Hitler, found every reason considered but that Hitler wanted to be evil and do evil things.
Natural Civilization
/in All, Books, PoliticsFourteen thousand years ago, Siberian and Mongolian people crossed the Bering land bridge into North America. Following the ice-free coastline, they eventually found the Andes mountains, the longest linear stretch of mountains in the world. There, unaffected by Rome or Greece, or Moses, or Plato, or Aristotle, or by any of the rest of world history, they . . . naturally . . . became the Inca civilization, the largest, most sophisticated civilization of the New World. One hundred thousand elites controlled 10 million peasants, unified by a religion of sun worship, ruled by an emperor who was “the king, the pope, and Jesus Christ all rolled into one.” All land was state owned, peasants were granted rights to till communal lands. Taxes were paid with labor, which created surpluses of food, tools, and weapons, which were stored along the Inca road network, and which were used for times of want, for war, and for patronage. The few ruled the many. Natural civilization.
In 1528, Francisco Pizarro found a Bronze Age society, 2,500 years back in time. The Incas did not have writing, or money, but they had deadly slingshots, and clubs, and vast armies. The Spaniards, though, had steel swords, armor, and horses, and like tank warfare against foot soldiers, 168 Spanish horsemen conquered 10 million Incan foot soldiers.
History has been the story of men killing other men, and so also in the New World. The Incas had been fighting a gruesome civil war for many years, ever since their great Inca chief was killed by another old world weapon – small pox. His sons fought to the death for the throne. Atahualpa had just conquered brother Huascar and executed his entire family, and was on his victory trip to Cuzco, to be crowned Sun King, when strange boats appeared off the coast. At Cajamarca, Atahualpa crossed Pizarro’s path. He promptly executed any of his men that showed any fear of the strange horse beasts.
The Incas, it seems, did not know the plight of Montezuma and the Aztecs. They were self-sufficient mountain people, not traders with the larger world. Pizarro had been with Cortes. He enticed Atahualpa into a courtyard, and in a bloody ambush, captured him.
For ransom, Atahualpa filled the Cajamarca courtyard with gold. Pizarro executed him anyway. His wife became Pizarro’s mistress, and bore him two sons.
To subdue a civilization, dethrone its religion.
The last Inca Emperor, Tupac Amaru, in Cuzco before his execution, tells his people that their religion has been false.
“Lords, . . . Let it be known that I am a Christian, and they have baptized me and I wish to die under the law of God – and I have to die. And that everything that my ancestors, the Incas, and I have told you up until now – that you should worship the sun god, Punchao, the shrines, idols, stones, rivers, mountains, and sacred things – is a lie and completely false. When we used to tell you that we were entering [a temple] to speak to the sun, when we told you what it said and that it spoke – this was a lie.”
The Last Days of the Incas, Kim MacQuarrie, 2007.
Sir Paul
/in All, artAcross the way from his childhood row-house home, across Strawberry Fields, Paul McCartney met one John Lennon. Both of their mothers died while they were teenagers, both of their fathers were musicians. Lennon-McCartney wrote and performed songs, and the whole world went . . .crazy . . .over their music, and still does.
Paul is charming, kind, a devoted father, a faithful husband, a very successful businessman, and a Brit who honors his queen. He has always loved his Liverpool past.
“Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies”
He has lived 50 years of magic – wealth, fame, exhilarating creativity, and bittersweet pain and loss.
He still can’t read music.
What ever is the gift for songwriting and singing, Paul has it. He gives commanding concert performances, like a gifted athlete. He sings his solo career songs, yes, but with Beatle songs – which he is careful to do as they were originally done, . . . he brings down the house. . . . still. It is the Beatles music that carries gloriously on, ever ecstatically received.
Paul McCartney is reticent with personal feelings, and superficial in person. He barely seems to know Paul McCartney. “Maybe I’m amazed” . . . . maybe? He just never wants to get deep.
“the fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round.”
“Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say”. ‘Was I harking back to my mum? he asks. Who would know? Few realize that his song ‘Blackbird’ was written to console african-americans after the death of Martin Luther King.
“Take these broken wings and learn to fly“.
He can’t explain his creativity – or doesn’t want to. “I’m very lucky with my voice, I have no idea how it happens“. Songs just come to him. He dreamed the melody for his greatest song, ‘Yesterday’, the most recorded song in history. He spent months sure that he had heard it somewhere before, trying to find out where.
Paul has this mastery of melody, how it forms and carries a song. His best songs feel already known, like they could be no other way. The words, by themselves, have almost nothing there.
“there is an unmistakeable sadness in McCartney’s gaze and muted manner“. John Colapinto, The New Yorker, June 2007
He was unable to reconcile with the bruising John Lennon, before his death. And there is the losses of his mother and wife, both in the full of their lives, to the same disease.
“For well you know that its a fool who plays it cool, by making the world a little colder” – Ironically, it was John Lennon who wanted this line kept in the song.
Above all the acrimony and nihilism of his times, he holds out, decent, and up beat. The spirit of a 19 year old Beatle lives on.
“I’m never going to believe I’m 70. I don’t care what you say. There’s a little cell in my brain that’s never going to believe that“, Rolling Stone, March 2012
Driver
/in All, MoviesIn the movie Drive, the central character has a special talent. Driving, yes, but more compelling, he can stay calm and focused during intense moments, like driving fast and escaping the police, or like when someone is trying to kill him. It is a gift, his ability to stay cool, it helps him get by. But it may have helped him get involved with the wrong people.
Behind the wheel, his eyes centered on the road, he is ever wary, a taut spring. His smile is soft, his eyes rarely blink. He says pretty much only what is necessary to say. He seems satisfied staying in the background. Somehow he has ended up half way between good people and bad.
He meets a girl from down the hall, an innocent, vulnerable mother to a young son. He helps her out. Watching television, the boy says you can always tell who the bad guys are. Driver asks: ‘How do you know?’
The girl’s husband has been away, in prison, for what we don’t know. He eventually comes home, and has problems he can’t handle. He is roughed up to pay escalating demands for protection payments he may or may not have ‘purchased’ while in prison. This threatens the mother and boy. Driver decides to help get the money, in a robbery he has been asked to drive for, but things go awry.
Bad guys show up for the same money. They kill the husband. In a sinister luxury SUV, they give chase. Driver races away. He manages to get bumper to bumper – in front of them – going very fast, backward, in control. They think they have him, but just near the end of the road, an end they don’t see because they are looking at him, he spins around to the side, and they go on to crash.
But he gets found, and almost killed. He acts fast, and survives.
Somehow, he knows how to deal with creeps, how you have to speak to them, how you cannot trust them, how they only respond to threat and force, how you sometimes have to kill them.
But they keep coming, like insects. He has to stomp one to death, in front of her, in an elevator, to protect her. He has no choice. She watches. Maybe she thinks he is one of them. She leaves. What can he say?
They kill his friend.
He must have thought he was one of them, at one time, but with her he seems to realize he isn’t. He is not going to go back.
He phones her: “I just want you to know that you and the boy are the best thing that has ever happened to me”.
Then he goes to settle things, to ensure her safety. He gives the ring leader a chance to honor an honest deal. The guy doesn’t, of course, and Driver, nearly killed, has to do what he has to do.
He leaves the money with the body.
Swerve
/in All, Books, Ideas“Quantum theory predicts that the vacuum of space is a roiling bath of virtual particles that continuously appear and disappear. These vacuum fluctuations produce measurable phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, which arises from the pressure the virtual photons exert on stationary bodies. In 1970, Gerald Moore theorized that bodies in accelerated motion would produce real photons out of quantum vacuum fluctuation . . . Accelerated bodies modify quantum vacuum fluctuations, causing emission of photon pairs from the vacuum and dissipation of the bodies’ motional energy. The power dissipated in the motion of the body is equal to the total radiated electromagnetic power, as expected according to the law of energy conservation.” Nature, November, 17, 2011.
Acceleration of matter in vacuum space creates photons, particles of light. Acceleration of spin creates magnetism. Acceleration of mass creates gravity. There. . is. . something. . about. . acceleration. It is a form of change, of variation, in our universe, a special form, it is change of change – change squared. And it is the essence of gravity, matter, and light.
It is mysterious that light has the same velocity for all observers, but it does. To be so, it must be something like infinite acceleration, each point of light being infinitely close to being instanteously brief, but infinitely accelerated from the previous point, infinitely close to reaching an asymptotic limit of velocity that is, weirdly, infinitely close to being constant and therefore . . .finite. Einstein realized that light, then, being infinite acceleration that paradoxically achieves finite and constant velocity, is the universal invariant. It can be relative or variable to no other position or movement. Curiously, although matter and energy are interchangeable, only energy – electromagnetic radiation – can travel at the speed of light, matter cannot.
The Roman poet, Lucretius, in his famous poem: On the Nature of Things, introduced to the Roman world, the philosophy of the pre-Socratic Greeks of 300 B. C. These thinkers had deduced that the building blocks of reality – atoms – were infinitely small, infinite-in-number entities that repell and attract each other such as to create all things and events. These ancient Greeks saw, long before Darwin and Einstein and quantum physics, that the fundamental units must have . . . what Lucretius called: swerve – an irreducible, varying indeterminancy in their behavior so as to make for the change with variation that is necessary for the evolutionary processes that manifest all things and events, inorganic and organic. The most basic units of reality, they realized must be, themselves, units of variation, units of change.
“If all the individual particles, in their infinite numbers, fell through the void in straight lines, pulled down by their own weight like raindrops, nothing would ever exist. But the particles do not move lockstep in a preordained single direction. Instead, “at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree thqt could be described as no more than a shift of movement” (2.218-20 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things), Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt, pg.188.
“Even if cooled to a temperature of absolute zero, all objects will retain a fundamental jitter in their physical positions due to quantum ‘zero-point’ fluctuations.” Painter, et. al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 033602, 2012
Zero Empathy
/in All, Books, IdeasGestapo Chief Rudolph Diels: “The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it.” In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson, 2011.
For Boethius, the 400 AD Roman philosopher, evil is US – we all have capacity for evil, and therefore to combat evil we must look to ourselves and cultivate our goodness. Evil is the absence of good. “We must break the ‘cycle of violence‘. This is the modern view, the enlightenment view, the christian view.
That evil is OTHER, that there is a distinct dualism of good and evil, this is the premodern view, the Manichaean view, the view of Mani, the early 250 A.D. Persian mystic whose ideas rivaled and threatened Roman paganism, and then christianity. Evil is a force to be opposed, to be conquered.
In Science of Evil, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen finds that evil is a disorder of empathy. We all vary in our ’empathy quotient’. There are those with the ‘continuous, unstoppable drive to empathize‘, and those with lesser empathy. There are components of empathy – recognition and response, feeling and understanding, action and inaction. Failure to act is as significant as not feeling. There is transient empathy erosion, from fatigue, or drugs and alcohol, or depression. There is Groupthink evil, empathy that is over-powered by enthusiasm and solidarity. Nazi gatherings were organized pageants of celebration.
Lack of empathy can be a failure to be good, but it also can be something else. There are those with no empathy. . . at all, zero empathy. For them, lack of empathy is . . . .enjoyment. Serial killers relish their deceit and the knowing terror in their victim’s eyes. Stalin’s greatest joy was to go to sleep knowing that his plans for revenge were unfolding. Nazi evil was beyond efficiency. The Nazi’s precisely engineered emotional as well as physical suffering, over and above the murdering. They practiced this with a sickening aesthetic, an almost artistic intensity.
Empathy by definition is seeing one’s self in others. Those with strong empathy just aren’t likely to perceive, aren’t likely to “empathize” – with the lack of empathy others may have. This asymmetry of awareness empowers those with no empathy to use charm, and to thrive, and the rest is human history.
In Explaining Hitler, 1998, Ron Rosenbaum, in his survey of theories of Hitler, found every reason considered but that Hitler wanted to be evil and do evil things.
“Man is Wolf to Man.”