“The Rich Man in Hell and the Poor Lazarus in Abraham’s Lap,” from Das Plenarium (1517) | Hans Schäufelein / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
Elon Musk may or may not be “the world’s richest man” these days, depending on the wildly fluctuating value of his Tesla car company, a target for those protesting Musk’s “move fast, break stuff” approach to downsizing the federal bureaucracy through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk’s savage cuts have struck many as “cruel,” “heartless,” and even “disgusting,” implemented apparently without regard to their effects on beneficiaries, such as impoverished peoples in the developing world, struggling Americans, and the dedicated government employees who administer programs tending to their needs.
When accused in such terms, Musk has doubled down.
He does not deny his cruelty. Indeed, he recently insisted in an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan that sympathy for the poor, the struggling, or even just hardworking neighbors is not a virtue but a vice.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” he declared.
By his accounting, the natural inclination to reach out to those in need is precisely what has inflated the budget and created the burdens he perceives to be undermining the republic. It is only the cold-hearted calculations of people like him, devoid of empathy, that can solve these problems.
Musk is not wrong to attribute this empathetic disposition to the Western tradition. Indeed, among the greatest champions of what we now call “empathy” was Adam Smith—the very same eighteenthcentury Scottish philosopher and economist often called the “godfather of capitalism.”
Whereas in his more familiar The Wealth of Nations Smith had argued for small government and free markets, in his less-celebrated first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he insisted that “mutual sympathy” was the foundation of thriving societies: “How selfish soever man may be supposed to be, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.”
In the opening paragraphs of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith describes how viewing a beggar beset with “sores and ulcers” affects the spectator with an “itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies. The horror which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part in themselves more than any other; because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer, if they really were the wretches whom they are looking upon, and if that particular part in themselves was actually affected in the same miserable manner.”
Smith’s beggar recalls the parable of Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke, begging for alms at a rich man’s banquet table. Attending to his own appetite, the rich man pays no heed to Lazarus. But after their respective deaths, whereas Lazarus is “carried away by angels” after his death, the rich man is sent to Hell.
Indifference to the struggles of his neighbors is a sin, Jesus taught: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). To ignore the suffering of others is to spurn God.
Smith evokes the parable of Lazarus because it reveals how inclined most people are to spontaneously empathize with the poor man’s plight. This is good because it provokes them to conduct themselves with love and charity towards others.
The problem, however, is that not everyone feels this way. It is only those who can imagine being “affected in the same miserable manner.” That is to say, if they are so rich that they cannot even picture themselves in the poor’s man place, they may behave, like Luke’s rich man, with cool indifference: “Men, though naturally sympathetic, feel so little for another, with whom they have no particular connexion, in comparison with what they feel for themselves,” Smith writes.
The rich man tends not toward sympathy for others, but rather pride, vanity, even a certain cruel “rapacity” in their relations with others: “The fortunate and the proud wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness,” Smith observes, “that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery to disturb the serenity of their happiness.”
Compounding the problems associated with the lack of empathy that Smith attributes to the fabulously rich is the fact that those who are poorer tend to hold them in such high regard. “This disposition to admire, and almost worship, the rich and the powerful,” he laments, is “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” The more everyone else respects the rich, the more the rich become role models—and the more our natural sympathy for others is stifled. According to Smith, this has been “the complaint of moralists in all ages.”
Smith was right about the persistence of this complaint. I have already mentioned the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Closer to Smith’s era, Jean-Jacques Rousseau lamented that “everywhere it is the rich who are always the first to be touched by corruption,” and the poor follow. A century later, John Stuart Mill complained that the rich were the “great demoralizing agency” in Victorian Britain, insofar as their “gross public immorality” and lack of empathy were corrupting the morals of others.
And Elon Musk is right as well that the received wisdom of the Western tradition has long treated empathy as a cardinal strength of civilization. If his recent hints at an interest in reading and meditating on the Bible are to be taken seriously, it would be shocking if he had missed this message.
But what this tradition also insists upon is that it is precisely people like Musk, those possessing the largest fortunes, who most struggle to feel empathy, much less understand its importance for sustaining the social order.
Elon Musk may regard his lack of empathy as a kind of “superpower.” But for everyone else, from Jesus to John Stuart Mill, the lack of empathy is an existential threat to one of the key moral sentiments that has made the West worth celebrating in the first place—despite the proud indifference of “the world’s richest man” to the suffering in our midst.
