A Failure of Nerve -- Chapter 4
Survival In a Hostile Environment: The Fallacy of Empathy
General illusions of empathy misorient American society today and give license to undercutting well-defined leadership everywhere.
Societal regression has often perverted the use of empathy into a disguise for anxiety.
Another emotional barrier to reorienting leadership in our time is the focus on empathy rather than responsibility.
The constant effort to understand can be as invasive as any form of emotional coercion.
The focus on empathy rather than responsibility has contributed to a major misorientation in our society.
Empathy, "to feel in," is intended to be an advance over old-fashioned concepts such as sympathy or compassion.
The Nature of Hostile Environments
All organisms that lack self-regulation will be perpetually invasive of the space of the neighbors.
Organisms that are unable to self-regulate cannot learn from their experience.
These principals are not modifiable through empathy.
Description of the universality of basic life principles:
Every human organism contains "opportunistic infections" that are kept in check by their own immune system; it is not merely the presence of the pathogen that causes pathology, but also the response of the organism that "hosts" it.
There are always three factors involved in survival:
Friedman, E. H. A failure of nerve: Leadership in the age of the quick fix.