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empathy
What Protesters Know About Human Nature That Trump Doesn't
They know the real story of human evolution isn't about the strongest or most ruthless individuals surviving. Instead, our story is about cooperation and empathy.
Jun 14, 2025
In Los Angeles, protesters are standing between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and families. In Chicago and New York, all around the country, they're refusing to let children be torn from their communities. They're risking arrest to protect their neighbors, doing what humans have always done: refusing to give up on each other.
These protesters understand something that Trump's administration, and Elon Musk, fundamentally don't: We are not monsters. When President Donald Trump releases lists of "killers, rapists, and drug dealers" to justify mass deportations and disappearances of our beloved community members, when politicians paint entire communities as threats to our survival, they're selling us an ancient lie about who we are. And everyone taking to the streets knows it's a lie.
What the Protesters Understand
The protesters know that Trump's attack on immigrants isn't just inhuman, authoritarian policy, it's also outdated and genuinely bad science that contradicts the very reason our species continues to exist. They understand that when one of us is under attack, we all are.
The lie Trump tells goes like this: Humans are fundamentally selfish, competitive creatures living in a "dog eat dog world" where survival means stepping on others. It's a story that despots have told throughout history because it makes their cruelest policies seem inevitable. If we're all potential monsters, then we need strong leaders to protect us from each other. If compassion is naive, then brutality becomes wisdom.
Every despot in history has had to first convince people that other humans aren't worthy of moral consideration.
Elon Musk made this explicit recently when he called empathy "civilizational suicidal" and claimed that empathy is "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization." The tech mogul and unelected government official described caring for others as a "bug" that's being "exploited" and "weaponized." Musk is attempting to reframe our greatest evolutionary strength as our fatal flaw.
But if this were true, you wouldn't be reading this right now and I would not be writing these words. Our species would have gone extinct long ago. The protesters know this instinctively, and science proves them right.
We Are the Descendants of Carers, Not Killers
What do the protesters understand that Trump doesn't? They know the real story of human evolution isn't about the strongest or most ruthless individuals surviving. Instead, our story is about cooperation and empathy. Early humans knew that we cannot tear ourselves apart because our strength comes from being in community with one another. The humans who shared food during famines, who cared for the sick, who worked together to solve problems, they are our ancestors. Influential early psychologist Sigmund Freud could not be more wrong when he said that we are the descendants of murderers. No, you and I, all of us, are the descendants of carers.
Our caring nature is something we have been able to gather empirical facts about, confirming this across multiple scientific disciplines. Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes has shown how grandmothers caring for offspring allowed for more descendants and drove longevity in our species. Primatologist Frans de Waal has documented empathy and fairness in our closest evolutionary relatives. Even among nonhuman species, generosity is the norm: vampire bats share blood with unrelated bats to prevent starvation, and sparrow-like pied flycatchers will risk their lives to help drive away predators from non-relative birds.
We don't have to look to the past or to other species to see the evidence of our inherent compassionate nature being our strength, not our weakness. We can look at our own children. Toddlers as young as 14 months will spontaneously help others—handing objects to people who can't reach them, picking up dropped items, sharing resources equally even when they could keep more for themselves. This happens before any cultural conditioning, before they're taught to be "good." Research shows that 18-month-olds will help unfamiliar adults regardless of parental presence or encouragement; these fascinating studies suggest that this instinct to help is intrinsic to who we are.
This is our default mode. Cooperation isn't something we have to learn, it isn't a weakness, it isn't destroying civilization. Cooperation and solidarity led to our evolution and are our greatest strengths.
When We Believe We're Monsters, Monsters Win
So why do we keep hearing a different story about our human nature from people like Trump and Elon? Because the lie serves those who hoard wealth and power. When they want to justify policies that violate our moral instincts, they first have to convince us that morality itself is naïve, that empathy is a weakness.
Trump's rhetoric about immigrants is more than dangerous white supremacy in action, it's strategically designed to make us forget who we are. By flooding the media with dehumanizing language about people "poisoning the blood" of America, by claiming immigrants are "not humans" but "animals," by deploying Marines against protesters in Los Angeles, his administration is trying to override our natural empathy and tendency toward care for one another with manufactured fear.
The protesters in Los Angeles and around the country are refusing to dehumanize themselves by allowing anyone in our community to be dehumanized.
Trump's approach is not new, and criticisms of it are not either. As labor organizer Emma Goldman wrote over a century ago, "The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature." Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are charlatans selling us a lie about people in our communities being inherently dangerous. Just like Hitler, who used similar language about "blood poisoning" to justify his atrocities. Every despot in history has had to first convince people that other humans aren't worthy of moral consideration.
The current administration's approach follows historical patterns predictably. First, criminalize an entire population with selective statistics and inflammatory rhetoric. Then, when people naturally recoil from the cruelty of family separations and mass deportations, send in troops to suppress that moral instinct. Finally, frame any resistance as evidence that society is breaking down and needs even harsher measures. Trump has been orchestrating the chaos he needs to justify martial law.
Why This Matters Now
The protesters in Los Angeles and around the country are refusing to dehumanize themselves by allowing anyone in our community to be dehumanized. They are standing up for immigrants, refusing to let children be abducted from schools, because they understand that a society that abandons empathy for some will eventually abandon empathy for all. They know that when we allow the dehumanization of any group, we weaken the very bonds that make civilization possible.
Resisting the lies Trump tells us about human nature is urgent. If we believe the lie that humans are fundamentally selfish, we may become passive in the face of policies that violate our deepest values. We accept mass deportations and disappearances because we're told those who are being removed are monsters. We support militarized responses to peaceful protests because we're convinced our neighbors are our enemies.
But those are all lies. We have to hold on to the truth of who we are. We see that policies based on fear and division make us less safe, not more. We understand that our liberation truly is bound together. We see that people protesting the disappearances of beloved community members are fighting for all of our freedoms and rights. They represent the truth of who we are.
We are not a species of monsters barely held in check. We are not doomed to destroy each other when resources get scarce or when we encounter people who look different from us. We are the species that figured out how to care for each other across genetic lines, how to cooperate with strangers, how to build civilizations based on shared values rather than shared DNA. We have 14-month-olds who instinctively help others, brains that reward us for fairness, and genes that predispose us toward generosity. Moving toward collective liberation is our true nature.
This is what our true nature looks like in action. Not Musk's "bug" to be eliminated, not Trump's weakness to be exploited, but our species' greatest strength. When we stand up for each other, refuse to dehumanize anyone in our communities, and build futures where everyone can thrive, we're not being "suicidally empathetic." We are being magnificently, dangerously, revolutionarily human.
And every act of solidarity proves what despots fear most: that true power is our commitment to one another, our refusal to dehumanize and discard anyone in our community. This is the power that topples empires. Not by denying humanity as they do, but through the simple, revolutionary act of affirming it for everyone.
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Maintaining Empathic Sanity in Trump America
There’s more to this than simply “opposing Trump”—fighting, you know, our enemy. It’s also a matter of honoring and acting in sync with large, complex values.
Apr 20, 2025
From Gulf of America to mass expulsion of “illegals” (people of color) to continuing genocidal complicity in Gaza to whatever the daily news brings us... welcome to Trump America! Welcome to the small-minded white nation so many long for, free once again from those large, inconvenient values—e.g., the Declaration of Independence—that keep disrupting the way things are supposed to be.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”
Cone on! In Trump America, those words were never meant to be taken literally. They create a sense of what I call empathic sanity, which has led to, for instance, the civil rights movement. But as President Donald Trump understands, empathic sanity can’t compete politically with hatred and fear—the creation of some good solid enemies—especially when mainstream Democrats, in their desperation for financial backing, are more than willing to shrug and minimize their values in the name of compromise.
If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments.
Trump, on the other hand, snorts at compromise, at least publicly, and pushes the agenda that works politically. He’ll do so even in defiance, for instance, of the Supreme Court, which recently demanded the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the hellhole prison in El Salvador to which he was sent without trial, without charges, without any chance to plead innocence. Garcia is a legal U.S. resident (father of three children who are U.S. citizens, husband of a U.S. citizen) and didn’t commit a crime, but he was snatched by ICE agents out of the blue and sent to a foreign prison. Team Trump has ignored the court’s demand for Garcia’s return, declaring that his deportation was an act of “foreign policy”—which they can conduct free of oversight.
This is all about clearing the country of enemies: of non-whites. Call them terrorists, call them criminals—dehumanize them—and then deport them. In Trump America, this is foreign policy. Millions of Americans are now in fear of deportation—for expressing the wrong political opinion (stop bombing Gaza), for simply being the wrong color.
And as Thom Hartmann pointed out, Trump is planning to up the ante. His team could start going after “you and me”—U.S. citizens who simply annoy him politically. Hartmann quotes Trump, in conversation with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele: “Home grown criminals. Home growns are next.”
And he adds, referring to the prison where Garcia was sent (the U.S. pays El Salvador for its use as a human dumping ground): “You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”
Trump as a looming Hitler? Yes, I’m sure that’s part of the current state of America, but in the present moment the primary issue is the full-on return of racism. As Clarence Lusane writes in The Nation:
There is a straight line from the 2017 “unite the right” rallies in Charlottesville to the far-right-led “Stop the Steal” movement to lies about Haitians eating cats and dogs to Donald Trump’s first day in office upon his return to power. No president in the post-civil-rights era has been as racially aggressive as the now-47th president.
Trump, Lusane notes, is the nation’s “white nationalist in chief.” His actions three months into his second term range from renaming the Gulf of Mexico (what was it again... Gulf of Some Country a Little Further North) to “re-renaming” military bases after Confederate generals to shutting down all DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs to stopping “the expanding population of Black, Latino, and Asian people in the United States.”
Indeed, Lusane writes: “The second coming of Trump will be one long slog through the bowels of racial animus and juvenile reprisals. Permanent resistance is the way forward.”
Permanent resistance is certainly necessary, but as I think about what this means, I return to the concept of empathic sanity—that is to say, valuing all of humanity and working to create a world that works for everybody. There’s more to this than simply “opposing Trump”—fighting, you know, our enemy. It’s also a matter of honoring and acting in sync with large, complex values.
What might this mean? Here’s one example, from Jewish Voice for Peace, regarding a rally a number of organizations held recently—on Passover—in New York City. Common Dreams quotes the organization’s social media post about it:
We are outside Federal Plaza to say: Stop arming Israel. End Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Free political prisoners held by ICE. Stop the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and students.
They chanted for peace in all directions: “None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free.”
Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Jay Saper, whose great uncle had been at Auschwitz, put it this way:
This Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, we cannot celebrate as usual while Palestinians in Gaza face famine and the U.S.-backed Israeli government uses starvation as a weapon of war.
The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical: It calls us to strengthen our commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people. We commend the courageous students and all people of conscience raising their voices in dissent to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and call for the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil and all political prisoners.
“The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical”: That hits the heart of it. No real values are theoretical. If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments. This is not a simplistic cry. It forces us to grope for understanding that lies well beyond the borders we have set for ourselves.
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Elon Musk: Governing While High
This is the man whom President Donald Trump has chosen to advise him and to oversee the workings of the federal government, nuclear weapons included. Is he “almost always sober” when he does it?
Apr 01, 2025
Though this column comes to you on April Fool’s Day, it’s no joke. By now, it’s likely that many of you reading this piece have seen enough of our de facto president’s behavior to wonder if he’s in his right mind.
On January 6 last year, The Wall Street Journalran this headline:
Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and Space X
In this case, the drug in question is ketamine, a powerful anesthetic and hallucinogen known to be addictive. In answer to questions about his drug use, Musk has stated that he uses the drug under medical supervision to treat chronic depression, adding that he’s “almost always sober” when he writes posts on social media during the pre-dawn hours, and that he makes sure his drug use doesn’t get in the way of his 16-hour work days.
This is the man whom President Donald Trump has chosen to advise him and to oversee the workings of the federal government, nuclear weapons included. Is he “almost always sober” when he does it? This is the man who spoke at greater length than anyone else at Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, where the barely confirmed secretary of defense was present, and where neither he nor his newly concocted department of government efficiency (no capital letters for its title, please) has Congress’ blessing. Somehow he and Trump pulled it out of the thin air of an executive order. Never mind that the Constitution places the power to create federal departments in the hands of Congress. Apparently the Constitution is nothing but a silly formality as far as he and Trump are concerned.
Then there was that little infomercial party he threw with Trump’s approval when he turned the White House into a Tesla dealership. Maybe Trump collected a commission. As for his values, this is the man who refused to say whether he would allow hate speech on his social media platform. This is the man who made his sense of right and wrong plain when he said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Now ask yourself: Would you allow this fellow to provide official cover and excuse for Trump’s tariffs, which are increasing the price of your food, fuel, and housing? Would you allow him to ignore or defy court orders whenever he wants, as he has already done? Would you allow him to rip apart Medicare and Social Security, on which many of you depend? Would you allow him to undo the effort to control the nationwide damage which climate change has done? Would you let him pry into your personal information? Would you allow him access to our nuclear arsenal, at a very time when the nuclear arms race has reached what the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has called its most dangerous point ever?
Evidently most of our resident billionaires would, as long as the money rolls in, now that the world’s richest man is in charge.
Maybe Mr. Musk is taking ketamine under medical supervision to treat chronic depression. For the moment, let us suspend disbelief and grant that point. Does it follow that he should be running the federal show at the expense of badly needed social programs, while Mr. Trump offers us his special brand of strange entertainment?
Meanwhile, those in charge of Congress are compliant, while those in charge of the opposition cave in and pray meekly for some sort of deliverance in 2026.
Such is the prank our leaders play on us on this year’s Feast of Fools.
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